Workplace Wellbeing Is a Scam?
tribunemag.co.ukWellbeing, even when it's sincere, is a top-down effort - as in way up the tree-tops - and usually raining down diagonally from a different org.
Meanwhile, down on the leaves of the org tree, you have delivery pressure from users, peers, and so on. If the pressure is high, no amount of messaging about wellbeing will make any difference. Taking time off, whether it's some kind of leave or for some wellbeing meetings of some kind, just takes time out of your workday, resulting in increased pressure because now you're even further behind.
It's quite hard not to become cynical about the disconnect between aspirational messaging and these pressures.
There are answers, but they require cultural and managerial enforcement. Heroism needs to be discouraged. Delivery slippage and failure to make dates need to be seen as organizational process and planning failures, and not as individual failures: feedback that schedules are too tight, expectations are unsustainably high, resourcing isn't right.
If your team or org has a culture of heroism - people risking burnout, working into the night, on weekends, on holidays, to make deadlines - stop it. Don't reward it. It's not sustainable, it creates peer pressure to do the same, and it is one of the most damaging things you can do to employees' wellbeing.
Let me tell you, delivery pressure exists even right at the very top. You think there’s no pressure as a CEO/COO beholden to 30% top line growth this quarter? I sometimes think about being in that position and it seems pretty scary too
Delivery pressure increases as you go higher in the management structure.
The most stressful part is that as you transition from IC to manager and work your way up the org chart, you become more abstracted away from actual being able to do the work and influence the outcome yourself. More responsibility, less direct influence.
Some managers struggle with this pressure and resort to trying to make their teams feel as much of the pressure as possible. Good managers learn how to set a healthy cadence, manage expectations upward, and keep a healthy but reasonable amount of delivery pressure on the team.
There is no realistic scenario where teams have zero delivery pressure, but it needs to be kept in balance. Burning everyone out all the time only works if you have a constant stream of replacement employees as everyone leaves, but then you lose institutional knowledge and reputation tanks. Managers who use these tactics need to be coached or removed from the company.
> you become more abstracted away from actual being able to do the work and influence the outcome yourself
You're definitely less able to do the work yourself, but ideally you can still influence the outcome by getting the right people to do the work and making sure they're not blocked, etc.
You can if you’re thinking clearly and able to be a good manager that can attract those people. Easy to fall down the hole of overwork, over stress, over pressure others.
Yes, but the typical CEO/COO does not have to worry about their family becoming homeless if they lose their job. Let us not be disingenuous about the stakes here.
Employees targeted by workplace wellbeing efforts are employees that need to be retained, almost always because of limited availability (see software). Let's no kid ourselves into thinking that in 2021 a software engineer will go homeless if they lose their job.
Software engineers can go bankrupt on healthcare costs alone. Either for them, or their family. Losing a job on top of high healthcare costs can force bankruptcy.
That, my friend, is called a privilege and a filter bubble.
I envy you how you have no idea how many devs are almost literal slaves. Not me, but I know plenty.
That statement does not make sense, if the devs you are referring to have no work mobility why are their employers even doing "workplace wellbeing"?
To deflect responsibility and employee resentment to other people. They don't care whether their almost-slaves are happy at the workplace but they want to maintain the status quo because even for them, losing devs and retraining new ones is costly.
Ah, yes. The pressure to deliver on specific growth targets in a nearly-completely arbitrary marketplace, which, if met, will result in massive compensation here, and if missed, will result in....massive compensation, then a shift to doing the same thing somewhere else for also-massive compensation.
Truly, my heart bleeds for the plight of the beleaguered CEO.
I came here to say exactly that. There is pressure everywhere. CEOs are scared of boards. Boards are scared of shareholders. It's just not that visible because there is no tool like "OfficeVibe" showing this transparently.
Sure, they get paid well. So you could argue that they have to take the pressure.
Stop having boards and shareholders then.
Or, at least tell them, our growth target this year is 2%, our growth max is 10%, if we grow more than that I'm concerned about the pressure on my employees and my goal is to have a great and sustainable place to work and not to fill the universe with paperclips, and I'm going to start laying off sales and marketing if we're taking on more commitments than we can handle. We're not letting you into the board if you disagree with it, and you'd better price this assumption into the stock if you want to hold stock.
You don't have to grow forever just because you're a company.
(I think I've heard companies register as a public benefit corporation to make it easier to push back on growth-seeking entryists.)
I don't understand what the target audience of your suggestion is - it's certainly not something CEOs, managers or employees can do.
I mean, there's a strict hierarchy there of who answers to whom and who gets to choose who to work with.
If the CEO tells the board "our growth target this year is 2%, our growth max is 10%, if we grow more than that I'm concerned about the pressure on my employees and my goal is to have a great and sustainable place to work and not to fill the universe with paperclips" then the board is likely to answer "it seems that our goals are not aligned, you'll be replaced with someone who does not share your concerns". If the board tells something like that to shareholders, then there's going to be a shareholders' meeting to replace the board.
"We're not letting you into the board if you disagree with it" - who's "we"? CEO's certainly can't say that unless they happen to be majority shareholders since e.g. founding the company; CEOs don't get to veto who comes on board, the board gets to choose who will be appointed CEO.
"you'd better price this assumption into the stock if you want to hold stock." - those who bought the stock get to set the rules including changing most company bylaws, so it's a legitimate tactic to buy stock in a company that's focused on being a great workplace instead of growth (i.e. the stock is likely to be cheap due "pricing in that assumption"), then destroy that assumption and replace the management to focus on growth, and sell the (now more expensive) stock. And it's very likely to happen since there are organizations whose whole business is to identify such opportunities and execute on them.
You don't have to grow forever just because you're a company, you're required to try to grow forever because the company shareholders want to. Companies can register as a public benefit corporation iff shareholders choose to do so, it's certainly not a way for someone to stop having shareholders.
The target audience of my suggestion is founders who don't yet have board members or CEOs who currently have like-minded board members, and who don't currently have public ownership.
You're right, once you've given up ownership to the public, it's a little too late for the current legal entity. But it's not too late to quit your job and start a new workplace.
Okay, that makes sense. However, that's plausible only if the founders can afford to start a new workplace from their savings alone without ever attracting external investment. A fully bootstrapped company can keep full control, but any significant investment will require the company to cede that control and have a "standard" board structure that can ensure that the interests of the owners are taken into acocunt.
In other words, founders without investors. They seldom have a lot of employees though.
I wonder if anyone works in a worker cooperative software company. I'd imagine there are some, but I wonder what kinds of software they do / products they make.
From what I've read about co-ops, I would definitely love to work at one one day. Even having to work more hours would feel more meaningful because I'd by benefitting my own bottom line in a way, not just going towards the CEO's private island fund.
I've actually thought about starting one. It seems like a software consultancy would probably be the best fit.
I work for a employee owned software consultancy in Oslo, Norway.
It is in deed ideal in many ways or ay least has been while I've worked there.
(It doesn't hurt either though that it is the first place I've worked for more than two - three years without spotting an a__hole or two. Take this into account.)
Do you think a worker co-op either/both avoids hiring a-holes in the first place and/or avoids bringing out a-hole tendencies in otherwise normal folks?
Being ~8 layers deep in the corporate hierarchy at my current place is very frustrating, and I think it probably affects my current a-hole level just due to apathy...
I think we've been lucky.
Maybe it also helps that everyone has a financial incentive in making sure everyone else performs at their best since that means more bonus and also higher stock prices.
Yes it seems like software consultancy would be the most obvious choice. I wonder if such a structure could expand to build a complicated B2B product, for instance. The example that comes to mind is some sort of enterprise wifi / networking thing. Could a co-op grow to encompass a manufacturing supply chain?
I just wonder how one would handle this beyond ~Dunbar's number. I've only heard of the company that makes Gore-tex handle this in a creative way [0], essentially splintering organizations into separate orgs once they became large enough.
[0] https://blog.gembaacademy.com/2011/06/21/dunbars_number_span...
Yep, I think for long term sustainability we need many more B Corps, because otherwise we’re all working ourselves to the bone for private equity companies (which often seem to be the aggressive profit seeking shareholders).
There is a lot of value in being good for your people, the environment and the rest of your supply chain.
Do you mean B Corps as benefit corporations defined by some state statutes, or those certified to be B corporations by B Lab certification?
Well, it depends what you want to achieve I guess. Apple and the like are very, very successful. And not because the pressure there is low. Quite the opposite.
A private company can do more or less what the owners want. Of course, they'll probably have less access to capital and employees should expect commensurate compensation/no opportunity for public stock appreciation/etc.
And there are people who say we’re paid well. There’s always someone who thinks you need to suck it up because of how much you get paid.
I’m not saying it’s fair. I’m simply articulating what most people think, I believe.
Shareholder liability is much too limited.
Liability for what? Burn-outs? They are liable. When the company goes bust they lose their money.
If the case of CD Projekt Red with the recent Cyberpunk 2077 game is anything to go by, the shareholders will get large bonuses while the cannon fodder get mandatory crunch time, stress, overwork, are forced to ship out shoddy work etc. Of course the bonuses are due to the companies prior good reputation so it remains to be seen whether or not that continues. But this situation is quite typical in the games industry and most likely others too
Don't a lot of those employees have options?
Unless they lose more it's not liability.
Ed: I can't take the first question seriously... Is it really a serious question?
Yes it is! I wouldn't even know how to measure the responsibility of a shareholder. What if I own just 1 stock of Apple? Am I then liable? I don't get it
Sure you are liable because you can sell at any time. You voted with your money to approve all that Apple has done. You don't approve a measure of it; that would be absurd. If you missed a shareholder meeting where they discussed doing something terrible, you are liable. As a shareholder you have the ultimate responsibility for the company because no one is there to tell you otherwise. You don't abolish yourself of your wrongdoing be remaining ignorant of what is being done in your name. This results from the very basic ethics of how society works so... I really don't like having to explain this to one of its members. ED: and once again the courageous mice of HN arrive to mindlessly downvote... you people sure are an endless source of disappointment
Not sure where your assumptions about HN are coming from but there's plenty of us around here who don't know the dynamics of being a shareholder simply because we are almost always at the bottom of the food chain.
Or do you think HN is an exclusive forum for actual business owners and shareholders?
You have 5k karma and have never noticed moderation here being a little bit trigger happy with the downvotes? Or is there something else you would like me to understand?
I don't think HN is exclusively business owners and shareholders, but I do believe that there is a lot more of it here than in hacker culture in general. I'd like to own a business myself one day, but I'm not sure I can extend myself to the ruthlessness required to survive as one.
We're in full agreement on the businesses + ruthlessness part. And yep, this place isn't just about hacker culture for a while now, that is true.
I’ll take it with a golden parachute.
Why not? Can’t lose.
As a leader, you will have to decide if you push a short or long term vision.
When it's short term, put pressure.
When it's long term, plan.
In a sense, a company run by the owner is more inclined to think long term than one where some CEO takes the wheel for 5 years.
100%. However the bias for people to write comments are through the lens they see the world. Most people are in the middle to lower strata of an organization (just as a numbers part) therefore they only see their own lens.
That and a general narrative from the news media that C-Suite has it pretty good relative to the rest of the world (financially they definitely do).
you know, now that i think about it, all the tears shed on conference calls i've been on have been from either senior management or directors. The pressure at the level is pretty intense, everyone is nipping at your heels to expose any weakness and take your spot.
Of course there is. But I'd hope the CEO revives compensation to make that worth while.
I agree. We're inundated with wellbeing emails and events, and while I appreciate the effort, it is just a token as only the lucky few with spare time can go to these things. When the balance is way off, taking more time for such meetings feel like a distraction rather than a fix. What was great was one Friday off per month, for the last year. It was just so nice to have a 3 day weekend so reguarly.
This is the takeaway - it has to be REAL and not just boil down to a few emails and some seminars.
And the only real way to make it real is for management, starting at the Board, being willing to take some pain - real pain like "we didn't get X done because we were concerned about employee wellbeing" instead of the "pain" of a budget item for some consulting company.
Workplace wellbeing
Wholesome workplace
Workplace is a family
The ground reality is when the company feels you are not needed, all that touch-feely stuff goes down the drain.
No, my company is not my family. I may have good friends and great co-workers, but, at the end of the day, I only have the amount of loyalty to the company, as much as it has towards me.
Perhaps its time the internet comes up with training sessions that promote the real face of large corporations.
I totally agree. I mean, nobody cares that I agree. But I have been hurt so much by all that bullshit that readin your comment makes me better.
Now I have this question for all the HR departments who engage in spreading those "touchy feely" terms : either you do realize that there's a problem with that, then why do you go on spreading it OR you don't realize there's a problem, then why do you feel those terms are acceptable for the employees ?
I honestly ask. Because all of that looks to me as a total intellectual scam. And usually, when I think this way, either there's really a scam, either my system of values is completely at odds with reality (and I need to understand my blind spot)
>I honestly ask. Because all of that looks to me as a total intellectual scam.
Most upper corporate messaging I've seen is an intellectual scam or intellectual dishonesty (be it HR or any department), although I'd say that's putting it far too politely.
These are typically well educated and skilled individuals that aren't oblivious of reality. They have careers and want to maintain them, so they maintain the corproate narratives that work and pass responsibility for lower level managers to maintain plausible deniability as to why efforts seem disingenuous. There are strategies to any of these moves or messaging and rarely ever are they in anyone's interest but the business unless you coincidentally have interest alignment with the business.
It's a lot easier in business (perhaps in life) to strategically lie and achieve measures of success than to be honest and be successful.
I am completely and utterly cynical of any piece of information and communication passed off by corporate entities or those who have heavy sway in their control and direction. They have far too much incentive and motive to be intellectually dishonest and little-to-none to be honest. Even apparently benign information is often strategically crafted, reviewed, and re-reviewed before passed off with very carefully chosen wording. It's not until you get to the underlying employees that I have any trust in what they say.
HR honestly seems like a terrible career to me if you actually care about people in modern business environments (I couldn't do it). You're essentially powerless in terms of business decisions and more often than not act as damage control between what business management unilaterally decides to do and how it effects employees. If your goal pursuing an HR career was to improve wellbeing of employees, it seems like a career where you'd be in for quite a culture shock in most environments. Of course they also serve to maintain and smooth out other legal compliancey issues and staffing needs.
I believe from the company's perspective it's viewed as a mechanism for reducing insurances costs.
The reality is that you can be arbitrarily harsh and negative , or arbitrarily positive to the point of delusion about basically any situation or set of circumstances. This isn’t theoretical, get a decent set of people (100?), put them in a specific circumstance and it’s quite apparent.
What is also apparent is that there are clearly objective differences in the ability of collections of people to thrive (or even barely cope) with the same set of circumstances based on the mindsets from the people composing the team. A good read to bring these into sharp focus is the book written on Shackleton’s voyage with the ‘Endurance’. ‘These mindsets are also clearly ‘contagious’ once they hit a certain point.
If a team hits a certain tipping point and is able to look at their circumstances and smile, it is self reinforcing. They’ll be able to face hardship productively, work together despite differences, and everyone will be better off. If no matter how good it is, they’re going to be miserable - that is also self reinforcing. It will be miserable for everyone, and the only people who stay will be those who feel at home in misery.
Being miserable is also associated with worse health, personal relationship issues, higher insurance costs, absenteeism, turnover, difficulty retaining key talent, etc.
The company wants (and often needs) people that work hard regardless of the circumstances, that will find a way to make a situation positive and productive, etc. This can be abused. Even when not abused, the company needs people who can tackle problems to solve customer needs to survive (quite plainly).
If a company is well managed, they are able to make this a mutually beneficial situation without it lapsing into co-dependence or abuse on either side. Not very many companies are well managed. Partially because it is really hard, partially because American culture doesn’t seem to value or recognize proper management skills and the importance they have.
Covid has turned the screws and also pushed a lot of people into negative territory. This means a lot of companies that were near a tipping point before are now clearly over it - as are a whole lot of people.
It's also a great way to garner fake empathy and "create" a better working environment than you really have. People with lower/average mental faculties are more susceptible to these kinds of doublespeak.
Its like those oil commercials of "We care, we really do", showing a few ducks being wiped off from some horrid oil spill disaster, and doing nothing to solve the root cause.
> Workplace is a family
This one is the biggest eye roll for me. Family and friends don't give performance reviews and push other such metrics down your throat.
> Family and friends don't give performance reviews and push other such metrics down your throat
Oh, but society sure is hard at work moving towards this.
Edit: I'm short of time, but as someone asked me to elaborate, I'll briefly give a few examples:
- "Networking" replacing genuine friendships; related things such as "cut out friends who don't let you grow" which may be valid but usually translates to "replace them with someone who will lead you to material success" (that is, "networking")
- Parents micromanaging their children's lives, measuring their performance on various tasks and rewarding/punishing them accordingly, often without regard to possible underlying issues (e.g. mental illness)
- Parents making children pay rent after they turn 18
- "Tinderification" of relationships, followers as social currency, etc.
My point is basically that family and friends are being replaced by the individual and advertising oneself.
I think middle class society in the West has already reached this stage. I was talking about this the other day with my wife, after stewing about it bitterly for hours into the night.
The most common form of interpersonal interaction has changed from genuine offers of assistance to displays of status and evaluations of said displays.
It's unthinkable to do something as basic as ask your neighbour to "borrow" an egg or bring them some cake just because you have too much. On the other hand, you can sure as hell expect them to let you know that what you own isn't good enough.
The obvious conclusion to this shift, which is already playing out, is that people minimise the amount of interaction with others and we all become lonelier.
> It's unthinkable to do something as basic as ask your neighbour to "borrow" an egg or bring them some cake just because you have too much.
Really? This is a common occurrence in my neighborhood. Like it happens almost weekly. Is this really unthinkable in other areas? If so, we probably shouldn’t move.
some people are jerks. period. If you were stewing on this for a couple hours then you probably had a bad experience earlier in the day with someone. Not everyone is like that, in fact, jerks are sort of rare but they do exist.
>If you were stewing on this for a couple hours then you probably had a bad experience earlier in the day with someone
You've hit the nail on the head there, but what made me so angry about it wasn't that it was an out-of-the-ordinary experience but the norm.
> The most common form of interpersonal interaction has changed from genuine offers of assistance to displays of status and evaluations of said displays.
I don't actually mind the lack of cake. There's never going to be "too much cake", even if the communists got what they think they want.
I'm not much of a gift-giving person, so if a neighbor brought me cake, I'd feel like I owe them something in return, which is a weird feeling I don't want.
And I don't feel any status pressure, because I never even talk to my neighbors. My lawn looks like shit, my neighbors probably know, who cares.
No, it seems to me the principal component is online vs. offline. The most common form of interpersonal interaction for me, even before 2020, is talking to people online, on Reddit, Discord, or Hacker News.
Most of my neighbors are not people who I really want to be friends with. They're mostly older than me, mostly parents, probably with no shared hobbies or interests. But that's probably not even the result of "modernity" or "The Whest", it's probably because I'm a programmer with no kids who moved into a suburb where people assume you'll eventually have kids.
So the upshot is, I have to drive a long ways if I want to see a friend in-person. Which puts a chilling effect on making friends at all.
I often miss the college dormitories. Everyone is within a few years of age, nobody had children, many people had the same major or similar majors, and everyone was packed in close with no need to drive. But you can't treat a studio apartment as a real estate investment, so Real Adults don't want to live in a place like that.
> The obvious conclusion to this shift, which is already playing out, is that people minimise the amount of interaction with others and we all become lonelier.
Yeah, I don't like it either. But part of me thinks, it's also just becoming obvious how many people are not worth talking to.
> I'm not much of a gift-giving person, so if a neighbor brought me cake, I'd feel like I owe them something in return, which is a weird feeling I don't want.
> And I don't feel any status pressure, because I never even talk to my neighbors. My lawn looks like shit, my neighbors probably know, who cares.
> Most of my neighbors are not people who I really want to be friends with. They're mostly older than me, mostly parents, probably with no shared hobbies or interests.
Lot of assumptions in this post, and they all seem to be coming from you.
"I often miss the college dormitories." Me too, for many of the same reasons. I think my social life was most interesting during my dormitory days!
> But you can't treat a studio apartment as a real estate investment
Why? In cities with universities a studio will rent out immediately and has the best cost to rent ratio (at least where I live)
> I don't actually mind the lack of cake. There's never going to be "too much cake", even if the communists got what they think they want.
There's always "too much cake" if someone in your household cooks.
Cooking and baking are more efficient when doing larger quantities. In our case, whenever my wife feels like baking, half of it goes to one or two of our neighbors, because there's no way the two of us would eat an oven shelf's worth of cake (and conversely, baking just enough for the two of us feels like a huge waste of time). Just having that option - neighbors who like my wife's baking and are happy to reciprocate with their own - means more good stuff is being made at home and enjoyed by everyone, on top of building good relations with the neighbors[0].
Local cooperation and sharing is a good thing. I think communists/collectivists were wrong in forcing people to share, against their will.
> Most of my neighbors are not people who I really want to be friends with. They're mostly older than me, mostly parents, probably with no shared hobbies or interests. But that's probably not even the result of "modernity" or "The Whest", it's probably because I'm a programmer with no kids who moved into a suburb where people assume you'll eventually have kids.
Being a programmer and having no kids is definitely a factor. Suburbs, probably less so. I've experienced the same in both large (1M+) and small (~20k) cities. I've learned two things, though.
- Kids change things - having a child means you now have a big thing in common with everyone else who has children. You end up bonding with other parents effortlessly - experience of child rearing is a topic that carries you way past ice-breaking stage. And it's worth it, because parenting is challenging, so mutual assistance is worth everyone's weight in gold.
- Being friendly with neighbors isn't about shared hobbies or interests, it's more about being able and willing to offer some assistance. That can be as simple as having a toolbox, or some life-relevant skills[1], or raw strength to help someone push a car, or even just being there[2]. I'm not friends with any of my neighbors, but I have a couple of people I can count on to e.g. borrow some power tools, or to feed our cat when we need to go away for a couple of days. And they can count on us if they need someone to push the car, or have their smartphone checked out. These are all low-maintenance, shallow relationships, that nevertheless simplify day-to-day logistics for everyone involved.
> So the upshot is, I have to drive a long ways if I want to see a friend in-person. Which puts a chilling effect on making friends at all
That's the flip side of suburbs and small towns. I get a lot of weird looks when I say that we want to move back to a large city, from the small one we're in now - everyone seems to go the other way. But honestly, small towns are fucking boring. Even having kids doesn't change that.
> But you can't treat a studio apartment as a real estate investment, so Real Adults don't want to live in a place like that.
This seems to be changing, though :). Not in the sense of living in one (which is a different topic - Real Adults don't like small apartments simply because they need more space, especially once they have kids), but from what I've seen on my local markets, small apartments are hot stuff. Probably because short-term rentals are very popular now.
--
[0] - For the same reason, I'm happy somebody set up a community fridge ~5 minutes from us. While surprise sweets are always appreciated, a surprise dinner less so - so if we end up cooking more than we feel like eating, we can just package the rest up and anonymously drop it off for the less well-off members of the local community. It's a win-win: it solves the food waste issue for people like us, and people who couldn't afford it otherwise regularly get to eat high-quality homemade food.
[1] - Of which programming currently isn't one - none of your neighbors are likely in need of an app. The adjacent skill of fixing problems with computers & smartphones is in huge demand, though. As much as I hated fixing other people's machines as a teenager, I'm now learning to like it again: it's the one skill I can offer to my community.
[2] - For example, I have nothing in common with any of my neighbors, but I work from home. Some of the neighbors now tell delivery people to bring their packages to me if they're not at home.
Nah. I think humans still have humanity in them and are extremely tolerant of family and friends. Society places a lot of value and gives a lot of respect to those who help others get their second chances.
> Parents making children pay rent after they turn 18
i have two boys, if they're >= 18 and doing nothing but laying on the couch i don't see asking for rent being unreasonable at all! Coddling young adults as if they're still children does so harm to everyone.
Whether or not you're right, you just reinforced my point of there being some (maybe semi-conscious) scorekeeping happening, and the point on there maybe being some underlying issue (psychological or even social - we know young adults living with their parents is becoming a trend and I'm sure in many cases there's much more to it than simply "being coddled as if they're still children").
It's not score keeping. It's recognition that we don't live in a post-scarcity society, and our needs don't satisfy themselves. Labor and money are still required to keep quality of life in a household at a stable level.
I don't think turning 18 is the common boundary line here. Entering the workforce is. If you're making money while still consuming your parents' household resources, it's only reasonable to contribute something back. FWIW, I'd hope most people who generate income while living with their parents would recognize this as obvious, and volunteer to pay rent.
So more like "Family is a workplace" now that the other way around
Care to elaborate?
>Family and friends don't give performance reviews
I don't know about you, but I absolutely got 'performance reviews' every single time a report card came in. At least my manager doesn't beat me when I fail to meet expectations.
The intent is very important though. Your family beats you (hopefully, metaphorically) for poor metric performance because those are metrics of what they perceive as your future wellbeing. It's viewed as a proxy measure to your future happiness and personal success by many. They want to see success in your education so you'll be able to provide for yourself and find happiness (again, hopefully).
A business simply fires you for poor metrics with little notice because they care nothing about your past, current, or future well-being, they care about the metric itself that presumably measures how you help them.
If there was an overall well being performance review or report card, your employer wouldn't really care unless you were neigh irreplaceable. Your family on the other hand would care deeply (again, hopefully).
Start getting late for appointments and family gatherings. I want to see how long it will take until someone stops meeting with you or at least makes a remark.
Start promising things to friends and family, build expectations and then never deliver.
In the end you can start doing drugs and see how people react when you show up to grandma birthday stoned.
Family is also a family as long as you stick to some norms. No one loves you unconditionally. Workplace is a family but there is obviously different set of expectations and evaluation is more direct.
While family doesn't expect you to deliver value for them every day like a workplace, there is still a lot of expectations to be met.
Family is just the wrong word.
I find it goes even further than that. Just because someone is related to you does not make them your friends or good to be around.
Having to put up with shit "because it is family" can be really unhealthy.
Statements like "workplace is a family" really give me the creeps. I have never experienced it though so not sure how I would react.
Seems like people have different families and different workplaces, so for some of them the slogan may actually be true. Others are horrified to hear it.
I guess it’s nice that they are trying to care and all but I’m so sick of it at my work.
People encouraged to bring their ‘whole self’ to work has made my workplace miserable. I miss the days when work was just work, devoid of world politics, beliefs, and all the “let’s all exercise and be happy together” activities.
man bring "whole self" just sounds like bring your baggage and unload it on your coworkers. what a terrible thing to encourage.
Side rule: If you work in a place that has motivational posters on the walls, run like hell!
Every time someone (usually someone from HR) tries to point out how great a company is because of its great perks like awesome couching sessions (not actual training), great team-building events, the best coffee machine ever, table tennis, etc. and how these somehow compensate for a subpar salary offer, I tell them: you just pay me well, give me more time off, and I'll handle all that myself.
It’s amazing how many people don’t realize that the Beyoncé concert in the office comes from the same pool of money as compensation. (The company only does it because it’s cheaper than bonuses) And everyone showers Instagram with photos of the show.
Was that a real thing or was the Beyonce concert hyperbole?
Don't know about Beyonce, but it's pretty common for big companies to organize private concerts with big names for their employees. I guess it's a case of just spending enough money to make this happen.
It is pretty commmon in departments such as sales, trading or marketing as incentive to e.g. invite $singer upon hitting the years sales target. Or organize a short holiday, visit to a sports event, fancy dinner, something. Seems to spill over to engineering or the whole company in some places.
As a previous engineer manager this sucks . While sales people get all kinds of bonuses for doing their job. The Engineering team gets a pat in the back because nothing broke down.
On the other hand, sales people are quickly dismissed if they don't meet their goals; it's a double-edged sword.
I'd have to say that I would prefer the pat on the back to what most bosses consider good entertainment.
Not really related and I don't know about Beyonce, but during the dot com bubble, a company called Pixelton had a party with KISS, Tony Bennett and a reunion of The Who. They went bankrupt.
At BlackBerry we had Aerosmith, Van Halen, and U2 on different occasions.
In hindsight could that money have been better spent?
Real thing. Banks hire politicians for meetings, tech companies hire celebs.
This is true, but I'd rather have an office with tea/coffee, a drinks fridge, etc, than the extra salary that the company is spending on providing that.
In part I'm paying 40% in tax so if I'm going to buy coffees it's actually more effective to have them provided by the company. But in general, that sort of convenience and benefit is often worth more than the monetary value.
Tea/coffee in the office is very different to a expensive social events, but it's all on a spectrum, and I value some of those things more than the money. I do however earn a good salary, this could well be different for many others.
> In part I'm paying 40% in tax so if I'm going to buy coffees it's actually more effective to have them provided by the company. But in general, that sort of convenience and benefit is often worth more than the monetary value.
I actually started of my working career as a factory worker (nightshift, 12 hour shifts, seven days a week). It was customary to bring along a flask of coffee and a packed lunch.
Right now, even though we have company-provided coffee, I'd rather they just give me the money to bring a flask of my own coffee.
It's more convenient, I get to make a trade-off between quality and cost as the situation calls for it, I get to switch coffees if I need to.
In current reality, though, you are correct - overall it's cheaper for the company to provide coffee instead of giving you the marginal cost of the coffee you consume. I just wanted to provide an alternative viewpoint.
I completely agree – this all depends on the company, the people, the environment, everything.
I just think that saying "just give me the money" in all cases is a) not necessarily efficient, and b) glosses over the idea that a benefit can be worth more to people than the monetary value.
It can also be worth more to the employer! The UK government don't provide tea/coffee typically because it all ends up on public record and there's a perception that the media will be outraged if the government spent £10k on tea bags, even if that might be a perfectly reasonable expense across tens of thousands of employees (made up numbers, not important). The result is that in some offices you get contractors being paid £800 a day taking a 15 minute break to go down to the shop to buy milk for their tea, or to get a coffee from a coffee shop, costing far more than it would cost to just have some available in the office.
Tea and coffee ought to be a baseline in any office environment imo. I think it'd be worth it for companies to just pay for it, otherwise employees set up a tea club, spend work time doing it and fall out over it.
Terence McKenna used to remind people that tea and coffee benefit an employer more than an employee - it's not a break to rest, it's an employer encouraged chemical stimulant to make you work harder. As an employee, you're hyped to work harder - which isn't necessarily a benefit to you at all.
That companies have then reframed it as an "employee perk" is a very slick PR move.
I agree with the idea that many employee perks are actually detrimental to employees. But this one is pretty 50/50. I'm going to drink two cups of coffee every day no matter what, so employer-provided coffee benefits me. After-hours coffee I agree with.
If the company puts too much emphasis on the free coffee they provide, it's a red flag. It means you will need it.
I've often thought that instead of an expensive coffee machine, ping pong table or playstation, I'd like a tea lady (or tea person as they would/should be called now)
My previous company put emphasis on the free coffee, but it was a pretty chill place to work at.
Good point!
I was thinking of it more as the human right to a cup of tea (not meaning to belittle real human rights struggles)
Interesting, there's no tea/coffee club at my office - my company doesn't provide tea/coffee/beverages, but does provide keurig machines. People either bring in their own coffee machines/coffee/french presses or they bring in their own k-pods. I am perfectly fine with it myself.
I've never even worked at a company that could afford walls
I agree completely. As someone who is a "loner", these "perks" of a workplace are actively an argument against it.
Just let me choose how and with whom I spend my time, thanks.
I'm not a loner - I'm quite a social person - but I nonetheless agree. My work can be rewording and enthralling but it's also draining and it's full of people who I would (mostly) never spend time with outside of that setting. I've lost count of the number of retros / all hands over the years where people have bemoaned the breakneck delivery pace, change of priorities from above, chaotic management etc., and leadership have suggested team building sessions / coffee roulette / team lunches to boost morale. These days it just makes me switch off completely.
I'm with you. I may be an introvert but I'm actually quite social. The key for me is that I'm social on my own terms. Mandatory fun events and forced team bonding do nothing but alienate me from everyone else. The harder my manager tries to force me to be friends with my colleagues the more I refuse to.
also, most of those perks are made to keep you at the office.
"oh you wanna play videogames/have a massage/play table tennis after work? sure! but you can't leave the office, which means you are accessible by everyone even after hours. and because you are not technically working, you won't get overtime. oops."
I told my manager that if they want more than 40 hours per week, we can negotiate overtime. And considering my tax bracket, I'd rather be compensated with vacation days than money.
I don't understand why _anyone_ should be on a salary model of compensation. It doesn't feel like a privilege awarded to me as a middle-class white-collar worker. The privilege is the fact that I can tell my manager to stick it and I won't get canned immediately.
As a lifelong salaryperson: Salaried employees don't work for hours, they work to get specific tasks done. If your work only takes 4hrs, then you get a short day. If your work consistently only takes 4hrs, then you work fewer hours as a lifestyle.
Of course, employers hate this, but the privilege of salary is being able to tell your manager to stick it to them on a daily basis by pointing to the tasks and showing that they're done.
> but the privilege of salary is being able to tell your manager to stick it to them on a daily basis by pointing to the tasks and showing that they're done
Maybe at some enlightened place. But all places where I have worked in last 15 years, if it is more that 8 hrs its requirement of job but when its less, one still need to be at office for at least 8 hrs.
The sticking part may be true for once in a while but on daily basis, I need to just suck it up and stay at office regardless.
Do you have a method of seeking out companies that don't do this?
> awesome couching sessions
Did you mean “coaching”? Or is “couching” some new SV term I am unfamiliar with?
I've seen videos of "couching sessions" on the internet. I don't think they're entirely work-appropriate activities for my line of employment.
A good couching session relaxes even the most stressed up worker
> A good couching session relaxes even the most stressed up worker
Depends on which side of the couch you are, I expect. The couchers (couch-workers?) probably do get stressed by providing couching sessions 8 hours a day.
Sounds like an HR compliance issue
Are you suggesting that HR get involved?
Now I'm certain I've seen a training video about this.
I got suckered by this once and only once. What seemed to be a great environment and culture on the surface, with lots of good perks, ended up being the most toxic and dysfunctional workplace I've ever been at. I was completely miserable and left in two months. I just couldn't take it. Ever since any office that tries to advertise how "awesome" they are by showing off all the trendy perks they offer immediately gets lowered in my estimation.
> The real problem with workplace wellness initiatives, according to Katie—beyond being inconvenient and vapid—is their obvious attempt to make up for the company’s poor employee benefits. ‘
The real problem is, wellness seminars are an attempt to push the issue on the employees. Just like "plastic recycling" initiatives push the guilt and the effort onto the consumer. It's a redirection strategy.
Same with "Self-care" - are you burning out at your job? Do you need a break? Clearly it's because you are failing at "self-care", not because your job is stressful or unreasonable. It pushes the onus back on the worker to put up with whatever the job demands and frames the worker as the one failing.
Whenever I see advice for "self-care" or "mindfulness" I can't help but think of a pimp telling a prostitute to use more lubricant and use antibiotics if she complains about infections and pain.
It's not a genuine attempt to solve the root cause; so much as a way to alleviate symptoms just enough so they can keep ruthlessly exploiting the employee.
i disagree, are you expecting someone else to take care of you? Are you expecting someone to cook you a healthy meal as well? Are you suggesting handing over the welfare of your mind and body to someone else? Health ( physical and mental ) is on you to maintain.
Of course not - and that "cook meals" feels like a straw-man. I'm expecting a company to admit if the last few weeks have been full of crunch and have some flexibility when people say they could use some recuperation time, not have a meeting emphasizing the importance of self-care and expecting people to carry on as normal.
i upvoted your response, that makes a lot more sense to me.
It's also a cash grab by the "Mindful Mediation" consultancies. I am surprised by the number of corporations with Mindful Meditation programs, and how much they pay for these ineffectual band-aids. The fact that mediation consultancies have significant traction in today's "Human Resources" world is just nonsense and corporate doublespeak that pushes blame reasoning on the employee for 360 degree poor management. (FWIW, I'm a person that started mediating decades ago (due to being a youthful Beatles fan.))
I can meditate just fine on my own, I just wish my company would put it in the handbook saying it's okay to space out and relax as part of working.
I wish my company would give us a handbook...
I think my wellness is inherently my issue, and I'd prefer that my employer stayed out of it.
We’re all responsible for our own wellness but we’re also responsible for the wellness of those with whom we interact. The “wellest” person in the world could only tolerate a toxic environment for so long before they’d become unwell, through no fault of their own.
This is a limited view akin to thinking you're doing your part for addressing climate change by staying off the grid.
I agree with b0surk that this is redirection and fundamental changes to society need to take place. Like an end to wage slavery.
> in order for employees to actually be well, they need high wages, plenty of time off, and good healthcare
I feel like this is the point of the first half of the article. Obviously if you work for a generous, profitable company, and you get good remuneration, healthcare and work–life balance, then workplace wellbeing may be honest and beneficial for both employers and employees (this side doesn’t seem to be mentioned in the article). If you work for a company that pays poorly, has poor benefits, and low margins, then workplace wellbeing is more of the same. That all seems pretty obvious (there are benefits which are perhaps harder to fake, like pay or vacation days or limited working hours per week.) I suppose there is also a third kind of wealthy employer which tries to pamper employees into not wanting things the employer doesn’t want (eg collective bargaining).
The first half of the article seems to just be a vehicle for a proposed solution to poor working conditions, which doesn’t really seem so connected to workplace wellbeing.
"one of the biggest causes of stress in the workplace is a lack of decision-making power among workers."
You know what's also more stressful? Having to make more decisions in domains outside my circle of competence.
Give me total autonomy in my area, while also not burdening me with having to contribute to EVERY decision.
Or the in-between variant: constant meetings and initiatives to create the illusion of worker influence on major decisions when there is in reality none at all. A complete waste of time to check a box somewhere about "horizontal hierarchy", and at the end of the day the decisions are being made "in the sauna" as it were anyway.
One of the best things for my mental health at work was learning to say (and believe) "I recommend we do X. If the VP decides to do Y instead, that will make the delivery date later, but that's his decision and ultimately his problem, not mine."
In China I worked at a company which year after year was getting awards as a great place to work. But the perks meant staying after work for various events I couldn't care less about. For me the best perk I could have is to take a break from office stuff, not prolonging it after hours.
Meanwhile, the whole IT department had to be moved at some point in a tiny office with no windows. They were also putting a lot of pressure on employees to come work on weekend to fix bugs and get releases ready - and of course at no extra pay. But yeah, you had cake on your birthday and free pizza once a month. Such a great place to work for!
I went through a stage of detesting pizza.
"To thank you for your hard work, I've ordered pizza for everyone!"
'What time is it arriving?'
"7pm"
'Right so you're stealing 2 hours of my time, which you're valuing as a couple of pizza slices - and imagined I'd be grateful?'
"To thank _me_ for my hard work, I'm leaving at 5 to go get Chinese takeout"
The issue with these workplace wellness themes to me is that they violate normal personal and adult boundaries as if to try to access the psyche of employees, and this dismantling of personal boundaries is precisely what creates the psychotic and abusive relationships that appear in business environments. It is the lack of personal boundaries, and not the presence of them that creates harmful interactions and relationships.
The worst possible way to create a 'safe' environment is to infantalize people and direct them like emotionally dependent children because by treating people as non-adults, it removes their basic dignity. Without this, people act out without normal boundaries, and think personal observations and other bizarrely inapproapriate behavior is acceptable or warranted. Corporate yoga and pseudo religious mindfullness probably often has the opposite effect. "Asking" people to submit to religious activities like meditation, smudging ceremonies, ancenstral acknowledgements, mindfulness, hypnosis, yoga, and others is not relating as normal adults. Sometimes I wonder what the conversations on an HN for HR people would look like.
The most successful wellness programs I have seen came in the form of a self-improvement/hobbies bonus, and the 10%-20% open research/dev projects in some tech companies.
There is an interesting discussion here about responsibility. An employee is obviously responsible for his own well being but it seems that companies aren't putting in much work.
A good example is working from home: now it's the employees responsibility to find a good environment for working. The company now has several responsibilities less... I couldn't care less for that chair or desk that the company offers. Work environment isn't about where I put my butt and my computer. Hopefully working from home will become and option and never a mandatory thing.
Anyways there is more and more responsibilities on the employees and less on the employers (at least it feels like it).
> I couldn't care less for that chair or desk that the company offers. Work environment isn't about where I put my butt and my computer.
Lucky you :) Seems you didn't work on uncomfortable chair or on the kitchen table with kids running and screaming around. For me such basic stuff is very high on the list of priorities regarding work environment.
Well what I'm trying to say is: there is more to it. Chair and desk is just a tip of the iceberg. Could phrase it in a better way.
Core to all of this is that anything provided by an employer could be used against you. Even if I wanted therapy sessions I’m not going to share my work related issues with an employer provided coach, hell no.
One thing I’d like to see is independent co-operatives which a group of tech workers (across different companies!) chip in to pay for. They could include veterans for mentorship, agents to help with negotiations/job-hopping advice and possibly even representing you during negotiations, lawyers to help cross out stupid post-working-hours IP clauses etc
Something like a union but minus the grossest parts like mandating actual pay, employment terms, and benefits. More of an easily accessed professional services group. I’m sure this exists in other industries.
"anything provided by an employer could be used against you". 100% this. I worked as a manager at a large company and the managers and directors were clashing. HR organized a sit down with the managers so we could express our frustrations. They listened to us, walked away for a bit leaving us some busy work, and then came back and told us that essentially the directors are our bosses and we have no right to complain and doing so is very unprofessional, essentially yelling at us for 15 minutes. I left as soon as I found another job a month later.
Did working conditions really got much worse over the past 20 years? Or are people just becoming more entitled? I agree with the premise that workplace wellbeing is a bunch of BS (and just a small part of much large corporate BS universe), but is 2021 much different from 2001? I understand blue collar complaints and unfortunate situation workers found themselves in after union busting or outsourcing. But what's gotten worse in the white collar world, really? Benefits? They weren't that great 20 years ago, it's hard to find a place with good benefits now or then. Long hours? Not a recent invention. Your average corporation is a soulless greedy machine, constructed purely for extracting money. Trying to put a lipstick on a pig doesn't change the fact that it's still a pig. If you are miserable in your current workplace, the only real change you can make is moving to job that brings you joy. This outcome is much more likely than fantasizing about changing the whole organization you work for.
The biggest negative change that I've seen since the 90s has been the adoption of agile methodologies.
We used to have decent cadence in releasing software - maybe every couple of months, or even six. Now, everyday seems like a fire drill or a race to nowhere in particular. Managers generally seem to have lost the ability to plan or predict out over periods longer than a month. I thought this was just my bad luck, but after talking with others, I realize this is commonplace.
And, everyone on the team could at least partially explain most things in the system. Now, I run into so much copy-paste code. When I ask the programmer about what it does, they say "Not sure. I found it online."
And, there was a time when the programmers used to be the ones with offices with doors, if you can believe that.
There was also a short period of time (around when programmer salaries went to 6-figures) when programmers used to make more than their managers. Then, managers scoffed. To account for the rise in salaries, managers gave themselves bigger raises and decided to not hire as many senior programmers, because they're too expensive (or too old).
Yeah, similar here. Twenty years ago, when I was freshly out of university, I had my office with a door I could close, and a window I could open. I was given a task (one task, not multiple tasks to do in parallel) and was left alone to do it. I asked what needs to be done, then I did it. I was treated like a competent adult.
These days (before COVID-19, because that made things a bit unusual) the industry standard is open spaces without fresh air. Daily meetings in the morning, and then optionally more meetings during the day. Doing a few things in parallel, almost every week is a deadline for something, no time to refactor or learn new things. Free coffee.
Agile gives management the illusion of insight into what the developer does without having to look into the code or understanding the technicalities. Talking about features and problems with your boss is so much more appropriate compared to processing Jira tickets at constant full speed grind without after-thought or planning.
Benefits have indeed gotten worse on average in my experience, and here are two hard examples. Leave and healthcare.
Leave: It used to be that most companies had a formula for accruing leave, and that vacation and sick were separate buckets and you could accumulate quite a bit. You earn X hours of vacation and Y hours of sick leave per 40 hours worked. This was nice because it was an asset that belonged to the employee and had to be paid out upon separation. Most companies also paid out unused leave over the rollover amount at each year end, and working overtime meant more leave would accrue. Now most companies put everything in the same bucket, give you 30 days, and it's "use it or lose it." This amounts to financial engineering on the company's part, as it makes their balance sheet look better by not carrying all those liabilities, and they generally twist it to make it seem better for the employee.
Health insurance: this just adds to the cacophony of voices lamenting the state of health care in the US today. When I first entered the workforce in 2002 health insurance provided way better benefits, more doctors took the typical insurance plans provided, you didn't have to fight the insurance company, file pre-authorization paperwork, etc. Now every time I get a medical procedure it's a battle waged via paperwork.
> 30 days
Where can I find a job with 30 days of leave? A lot of places seem to think 15 days is beyond generous because they treat all PTO as vacation time and ignore that sick time used to exist. Meanwhile, my health issues make it extremely difficult to bank any amount of PTO.
Unfortunately it’s not helpful to your situation, but these issues are handled much better in many countries. For example, in Netherlands there are statutory holidays (20 or so?) then many companies give additional days on top of that. 28+ isn’t uncommon.
Being absent due to illness has no bearing on holidays either…even if you’re sick in one of your holidays it doesn’t count against your holiday time. There’s no concept of a fixed number of sick days.
or even worse: "infinite PTO" aka you never take time off because you are scared of overusing the perk.
Untracked time off is a double-edged sword for sure. I just make sure to take more time off than I would have gotten at my last job, and I tell my employees to do the same.
There need to be cultural norms set from the top around its use for sure. Though I'm not sure, in general, it's worse than pooled vacation/sick time.
I would hope that coming out of the pandemic there would be some rethink of a system that basically provides a strong incentive to come into the office sick. (OTOH, there may be more flexibility in terms of WFH so that may do the job at least partway on its own.)
And the trick behind that is when you leave a company, they have to normally pay for unused PTO.... Unless the PTO is "unlimited" aka not accruing.
And much research done academically and in business magazines shows that people use LESS PTO when it's "unlimited".
Tl;Dr. It's another scam companies use to bilk workers.
fairly standard in Germany. And sick leave unlimited (doctor's note required).
the 30 includes federal holidays so it works out to about 20 in practice.
Over here, yes, it has gotten worse since 2001 -- asian shops press much harder now, cheap remote labor really easily available ... competition vent through the roof. Longer hours, guilt feels stronger, sloppier work, inter-team communication destroyed (all-email in some language foreign to everyone), and -- still more lost deals.
This is for everyone, workers and management.
True, people maybe feel more entitled. But I think we also are getting introduced to a phenomenon new since 2001 -- having a solid "living wage" (which Trubune says noting else replaces), but burning out repeatedly, hating the job but being unable to quit, as providing for family takes more now than it used to in 2001, too.
Yeah, but how much of that is your current employer fault? Let's take housing costs. Absolutely insane in California, Canada and some other places. Education/student loans - modern day slavery for many. Healthcare costs - seem to grow much faster than inflation or wage increase. The end result - destruction of the middle class as we know it. Or 'shrinking middle class' to put it less dramatically. So, I take it you live in Canada and this is the type of experience you describe. Is there a list of Canadian corporations that are to blame for this? Or is this more of a government fault? Or is this the problem that's not limited to Canada but is a general trend for most western countries because the neoliberal economic model is broken and it's silly to pretend that it's not? Personally, I am hesitant to blame some specific corporation for general economic misery.
It's your company's fault because their leadership (you know, the one percent) got on the neoliberal, supply-side, tax cutting, privatization train ahead of the rest of the population and then worked like hell to condition everyone below them to believe it was going to be all unicorns and rainbows. Now that the experiment is failing (as evidenced by a renewed interest in Keynes -- at least for the FIRE sector), they're all going around saying, "Not me! Work-life balance! Inclusion! Human capital!" Except that they've spent four decades wasting and destroying the value of that human capital the way they did the rainforests, coral reefs, rivers and lakes, and the climate. Just dealing with all the piles of spent nuclear fuel is going to be a massively expensive, ten millenia project, but these people can't reliably plan out further than a few quarters.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I am far from blaming employer on that. Or anyone for that matter (not Canadian, Europe, our govt does what they can ... you cannot break bones to national business culture in one-election-term timeframe).
It is just that it feels hopeless either way: companies who strip it down bare to what the employed work really is -- a wolf-pack hunting together -- don't feel that great, and the opposite, pretending that we all are in the middle of a nice cozy great-place-to-work -- gets down on nerves after some point too.
The only solution, switch jobs regularly by all means. Play the national lottery.
>If you are miserable in your current workplace, the only real change you can make is moving to job that brings you joy.
I have no doubt some people manage to find this, but at this point I want a job that pays well and is tolerable, I've done the fun job for less money enough to know I'm terrible at predicting what's going to be "fun" to work on.
If I'm paid more I need to sell less of my time and get to find things that are enjoyable without my livelihood being tied up with it.
Work is work, not personal entertainment. Once one learns to accepts that, they will be in a much, much better path to life satisfaction.
Definitely look for a job with high pay, good benefits, lots of time off, etc., etc., But it's extremely unlikely you're going to find one that actually brings you joy - so learn to live with that.
Agile, lean - the idea of moving faster because you're always sprinting, always doing things just in time - has taken a lot of slack out of systems.
Something has to give when you need to making up time, when there's no slack. That's where the wellbeing deficit comes from.
Maybe entitled is the word but I think people just want to be miserable in peace, rather than having clown shows to remind them that they are indeed miserable.
Yeah, working conditions have become much worse. I am not sure if there is data to prove this, but my gut feeling is that employees are more productive and their compensation has not kept up to the increased productivity.
Alternatively, I would really love to keep the same pay levels, but reduced working hours, to account for increased productivity.
> I am not sure if there is data to prove this, but my gut feeling is that employees are more productive and their compensation has not kept up to the increased productivity.
You are not wrong, from the BLS:
"For several decades beginning in the 1940s, productivity had risen in tandem with employees’ compensation. However, since the 1970s, productivity and compensation have steadily diverged." [1]
[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/understanding-the-labo...
Is compensation really meant to derive from productivity? In practice, your compensation is a factor of how difficult it is to find someone else to do your job.
Yep. If compensation was a function of productivity, farmers would be the richest people in the world, because their productivity is something like 50-100 times than it was pre-mechanization and pre-green revolution.
You're not wrong about farmers, but it's in a tons of different professions. I mean, think how much more productive software devs are right now than the age of punch cards.
It was probably some efficiency involved in having computer clerks running mainframes for calculations and card deck (database) processing.
Nowadays people are supposed to do their own Excel sheets and use complex internal systems, instead of letting specialists do it.
So devs are way more efficient but are too fine dining to do every day Excel.
Measuring productivity is unintuitive because it's not linear.
Sure, if there were no farmers, there'd be no food.
But if there were no mechanization, the current number of farmers would be wildly insufficient.
We're adding 1 + 1 and getting 102, and the tricky part is dividing the extra 100 points amongst everyone.
> We're adding 1 + 1 and getting 102, and the tricky part is dividing the extra 100 points amongst everyone.
If Georgism is right, in long term the extra 100 points go to those who own the land, via rent.
Not just the rent you pay directly for the place where you live, but also indirectly whenever you buy someone's product or services, because that other person also had to include their rent in the cost of their product or service. Thus when the rents increase, everything gets more expensive, and ironically that makes it more difficult to notice that most of that money ultimately goes towards paying someone's rent.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr...
> Your average corporation is a soulless greedy machine, constructed purely for extracting money. Trying to put a lipstick on a pig doesn't change the fact that it's still a pig.
I think average working conditions did get worse over the past few decades, primarily because so many more jobs are working for such companies. Consider how many more grocery store jobs are working for a huge supermarket chain vs owning your own small store in 2021 vs 50 years ago.
Owning your small store is extremely stressful, and arguably provides worse working conditions (on average) than the equivalent middle-management job in a supermarket chain. However, it might well be perceived as more satisfying by the worker, because s/he is less alienated from business outcomes and more autonomous in long-term choices. In this, the article probably has a point (although coops are not a panacea - if you don’t enjoy the political process, you might even find them more annoying than a traditional structure).
Having worked for a midsize customer owned cooperative with a large engineering shop, I think there is something to be said about the structure. Our board was our customers, who cared about continued support and customer service rather than quarterly earnings. Things did go downhill correlated with a new CEO, but it was a great culture to work in for a while.
> Did working conditions really got much worse over the past 20 years?
In terms of salary and purchasing power in Western countries, yes I think so.
I think developer salaries outpaced inflation by a decent margin.
And housing costs have outpaced salary growth by a similar margin.
In SV, sure, but I don't think that holds true in other parts of the world, even in major cities like London.
So I just did a quick google on London and I don't know if I'm missing something but it seems like senior software developer salary is less than the avarage salary (senior developer 77,500, avarage is 86,400). On glass door I see 50-70k GBP for senior developers.
This sounds horrible, but I have a feeling London/Wester Europe is unique in this regard, I can make that kind of money remoting from Croatia.
I think your average salary figure is wrong
Speaking as a survivor of the EA Spouse era, the last 20 years have been holding the status quo of abuse established by EA during the 90's. Their horrible form of 24/7 crunch time management has simply spread throughout the rest of the corporate world, but not as extreme as they drove it.
I feel this is one of those areas where it pays off if you are a bit darker and a more cynical individual. If you ask any random Eastern European (a group to which I belong) I can bet my neck that likely 90% of them will tell you "workplace well-being is a feel-good signal for the people on top and nothing else".
I have had people fiercely contesting this with me during a table conversation, only for them to eventually begrudgingly admit in the end: "Yeah, I see your point, maybe preaching yoga to very stressed people who already almost don't have free time in their day isn't the best way to go about this...". And I am like -- oh, you think, dude?
There are a number of things that can be done but I found many organizations to not care about enforcing policies like "no Slack messages after 19:00" or "minimize emails religiously" or "is this meeting actually useful for anyone except me who is in a chatty mood?" etc. Not to mention have people who police the meetings to keep them on topic and brief. And somebody paying attention if you are loaded with responsibilities outside of your job description? That's science fiction.
Start from these: multi-tasking and having too many responsibilities. Reduce these two factors for each person as much as possible -- or, if the person likes the extra load, maybe consider a pay bump plus reducing a smaller chunk of their stress.
Before something else outside of empty virtue signalling is done, the problem will persist. Companies just refuse to see the huge problems that even a single employee possessing a lot of institutional knowledge leaving will entail, so I guess they'll just keep suffering and pretending that some extremely half-done measures will fix the problem.
They will not. Nobody cares about your luxury coffee at the office. Nobody cares about the funny furniture. Nobody has their life sustainably improved by a free neck massage for 15 minutes a week (although it does help somewhat).
If any manager or business owner is here, take this single piece of advice: aim for measures that solve problems long-term.
I don't think "It's a scam" - just every implementation of it I've seen.
Similar to 'self-guided learning' - Sure it's nice being able to get cash to pay for any online course I like, but it doesn't give me the "week in a room just focussing on a topic" that a more formal course would provide. It's the time given, not the course provided that was more valuable.
It can work though if initiatives are related, ranked clearly and measured. (Hypothetically) A company might provide bonuses to management for the profitability of projects. Simultaneously, it might wish to discourage weekend working - people quit and quality suffers. With those two goals disconnected, you can guess what happens.
If you link them - say internally bill for hours worked and double for weekends, rather just time-elapsed, then suddenly weekend work mainly vanishes - and projects are better resourced at the outset.
To loop back to the "Wellness" you could implement it with commitment to resources, metrics, stated goals and I think it would work fine.
Why are we promoting wellness? How are we going to measure it? What resources are you providing I didn't already have? etc.
I thought not much about this corporate wellbeing stuff until Corona. Then decisions my employer made started directly affecting my chances for survival. My employer was surprisingly proactive and protective very unlike the one of my wife.
This wellness spam is virtue signaling. Whether it is truly based on values becomes only visible when the boundaries are tested.
I would agree. I was pleasantly surprised with how my company handled the pandemic. I knew going into the job that they had a reputation for treating their employees well, but I saw it first-hand with how they handled work from home, letting employees be flexible with time, letting employees take home equipment, and a million other little things. (We have a huge manufacturing footprint and quite a few place-dependent workers in other areas. I’m unsure if they are as happy as most of the work-from-home crowd, to be fair. I just don’t interact with that part of the org)
Because of how well they have treated us, I see the occasional advertisement for yoga classes or meditation sessions as a perk I’m not interested in, instead of as a symptom of a poor workplace environment. However, if I felt constantly overworked, under appreciated, and under-equipped, each one of those emails would definitely feel like a slap in the face.
Oh well in the US they actively abolished their right to organize and have a democratically formed representation against the autocratic corporate hierarchy. Ceos could not care less about the company or its employees. What is the worst case scenario for them? A golden parachute on top of platinum compensation that is 100’s of times higher than their average employee. The employees and the local community will have to eat the s** from the management decisions. There is no social accountability for mismanaging companies, despite its wide social repercussions.
>but no amount of self-care can substitute for a living wage, manageable hours and secure employment.
The motivation behind not providing these things is so that employees are too burned out to look for another job: https://issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems.html
on the subject of pointless employee "benefits": I recently started working as a courier for a big food delivery platform. the agency through which I'm "employed" emailed me the other day about the benefits they provide, which consist of a link through which I can _buy for $15_ a phone app which gets me a small discount at a selection of participating retailers.
I want to be allowed to do my work and then I want to go home. I can’t be weller than that.
I work for a Huge healthcare corporation; they own 23 hospitals and employ over 60,000 people. Yet lunch breaks are 30 minutes long--an Adult can not eat a healthy meal in 30 minutes, a 6 year probably could though, they require far less food than a grown man.
They also constantly promote walking as a real form of exercise---which is a joke. You have to workout to be healthy: working out, in case you don't know, is painful and it makes you smell bad; but there is No substitute.
It’s been shown that these programs don’t improve health outcomes, but I believe there are tax & insurance benefits for employers who offer them.
The only time your boss will give you a raise is when not giving you the raise would cost more money than the raise.
You could flip it around and say you will get a raise when there's a positive ROI on that raise. However, the point is the same. How could or why would you expect otherwise?
This never happens. Ever.
At one of my previous employers they boasted about the uptake of the free counselling service, which was more of an alarm bell to me
hah yeah my employer has a legal benefit which basically just means a free divorce lawyer.
Wow, no thanks!
I really dislike HN's custom of redacting strong statements in titles into questions by adding question marks at the end.
HN's custom of redacting strong statements in titles into questions by adding question marks at the end is horrible?
My issues with these things is that it's selling friendliness coated in newspeak lingo to make it special.
Agreed - it's all BS. I get no benefit from the company pushing wellness crap.
In case it wasn't apparent, it's useful to keep in mind that Tribune is very explicitly [0] a socialist magazine. That isn't to undermine the article's point -- which I largely agree with -- it's just critical to keep in mind the author's intent.
As a somewhat outside observer (socially liberal/democrat country, in SWE but outside of VC/Silicon Valley/FAANG - for now!), I wonder if the community think the rise in "F** you, pay me"[1][2] sentiment will be mediated in any way? I can definitely see the rise of this feeling with record profits, sky high stock prices, big Venture Funding rounds paired with rising income inequality it makes sense. If a group of workers are core to a companies profits, as Software Engineers are for tech companies, demanding a larger share of said profits also makes sense and should be encouraged. However if this new mercenary attitude is to just move at will because you can[3], I don't know how that endgame plays out. Is this a feature of the winner takes all/gold rush era we're in at the moment, does it fizzle out, is there a crash? Just thinking out loud as how this progresses...I dunno I just find it interesting.
I'm sure the response will come something about the company do not care about you, however now I've started to see people here regard anyone just one "level" above them as part of the global capitalist elite.[4] All seems a bit unsustainable to me.
[1] https://twitter.com/IanColdwater/status/1359940513621827592 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27114714 [3] https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1381474017773641731 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27116464
I haven't been in Sweden for a while, but in Finland there's large headlines about a major shortage of tech workers, but based on what I've seen it's basically tech workers changing careers because they are:
1) fed up with useless benefits 2) get no possibilities for developing their skills while on the job 3) are expected to work unpaid overtime for wages that won't pay the rent in the larger cities
I've no idea how it will end to be honest, but I suspect there'll be a lot of buzz about it once post-COVID hiring starts.
>in Finland there's large headlines about a major shortage of tech workers
same where i live, tons of headlines saying there's shortage, but in our case, the salaries are just horrible. not only that but when you have a job that pays well, they basically demand your life for the company.
it's much better to work as a contractor for foreign companies than working at local ones.
> However if this new mercenary attitude is to just move at will because you can[3], I don't know how that endgame plays out.
It is a business, moving at will is how resources get allocated and how it is supposed to play out.
Outsourcing is the new slavery. I've been working in call centers for the last 3 years, and on top of that, I live in a third world country...yeah...I'm fucked.
Hang on, first sentence:
>As conditions at work deteriorate,
How so?
This is so true. If a company has any wellbeing programs or even "free lunch" or "pizza Fridays" it's a big red flag. It basically means they don't pay enough for you to afford a pizza or lunch, not to mention a private therapy if stress gets onto you. Probably some managers are feeling guilty they pay so little, so they come up with these virtue signalling schemes. It doesn't bother them that they take private jets for a quarterly getaway in Caribbean, while employees spend extra hour before work to make sandwiches, because they can't afford going out at their lunch break.
What you're describing sounds totally different from the wellness program described in the article. What the article describes is something that seems to be totally targetted at individuals. If you desire them, and get paid enough, you could just get them yourself - there's no reason for the company to get involved.
What you're describing are more like team building. Enforced lunches or dinners with coworkers are not just about directly rewarding you with free food, but also enforcing some informal time with team members that you might not choose to spend time with outside of work (or even those you might but maybe wouldn't normally make time for). In many cases it's not even disguised that this is the goal. Although I might not always be a fan of spending time with some of those people, I see the benefit to the business and even myself and it's quite orthogonal from compensation.
In none of the job I had did my colleagues discuss work at lunch. It was and is a kind of big no no. Might be a cultural thing.
In many workplaces lunch breaks are not paid. I view my lunch break as a sacred time for myself and as an introvert I use this time to recharge. Unfortunately employers don't see these schemes as discriminatory. Any team building stuff means that HR didn't do a great job at hiring and since often it is difficult to let people go, they do that to "patch things up".
Regarding optional programs, sure these exist - unfortunately you are unable to get a cash equivalent if you don't want to use it.
> Any team building stuff means that HR didn't do a great job at hiring
This is just wrong. Team building has a place like anything else and reasonable people can disagree about how much is too much.
While I disagree with this, that's not the point. My actual point was that your comment is off topic for this article, and that still stands.
I battled with a previous employer with this. I don't care about the yearly weekend getaways, bi-monthly restaurant dinners, takeaway etc you buy us, I know best what makes me happy and its not that. Just give me what I need to do my work, be a good manager, give me good pay and let me enjoy my life outside of work in peace.
Right but this suggests those things might be for your benefit when it looks to me like they're for team cohesion ie for the employers benefit. There's nothing wrong with that unless they're trying to portray those things as being for your benefit!
Exactly, pre-COVID we would go out for a group lunch maybe once every month or two. 7 or 8 people total. Everyone paid their own way so it wasn't seen as a benefit but everyone did acknowledge it as a good bit of team building/cohesion around something everyone was going to do anyway (eat) so it was much better than trying to do something after hours or on a weekend when we have better things to do, or during the work day when the company has better things for us to do.
Yes, a multi-day team (weekday) offsite every now and then is fine (and probably beneficial). But, in general, weekend getaways and things like that are bad practices.
Normally I travel a lot so nights and at least parts of weekends away are pretty routine for me. But companies should attempt to minimize it to the degree possible.
> If a company has any wellbeing programs or even "free lunch" or "pizza Fridays" it's a big red flag. It basically means they don't pay enough for you to afford a pizza or lunch
No, and there are many companies that serve as counterexamples. Companies can offer both high compensation and small office perks, food and other gimmicks.
Exactly, every time workplace conditions comes up on HN, it seems like the vast majority of people just work at companies that absolutely suck. They then come to the conclusion that all companies suck.
It is actually possible to have a well paying job, at a company that also try to care about your well-being.
I realize this is a forum that caters to tech folks who might be accustomed to these kinds of perquisites, but I’m pretty sure you’re describing the default state of employment for the vast majority of people. No free food. No restaurant lunches everyday. No attention paid to employee mental health/wellbeing.
That's definitely true. I remember well when I wasn't able to afford a restaurant meal, but a manager was taking us out for lunch to quite expensive ones, my partner was crying that we weren't going out for ages and I am going to restaurants. That put me in a bad place mentally. She even asked me if I could get some leftovers home, but I couldn't get myself to ask that as other employees wouldn't ask. I didn't want to look like I have a problem (that is not being paid enough). So on my way from work I'd draw some of my savings and buy a small meal at inexpensive restaurant and pretend I got saved some food for her. That's why I despise such programmes.
Wow that’s really sad to hear, hope both of your situation has improved
I worked for a hedge fund that did pizza on Fridays. I can assure you that ordering that for everyone was unrelated to the pay.