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Workplace Wellbeing Is a Scam?

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Re: Workplace Wellbeing Is a Scam?

#51

Post by throwamon »

mtberatwork wrote: post #50
kumarvvr wrote: post #23

Workplace wellbeing Wholesome workplace Workplace is a family and a myriad of other touchy-feely terms are just plain bullshit. Whole industries have cropped up to support the efforts of managements to keep workforces in control and deflect resentment (people don't leave companies, they leave managers ! and other crap) The ground reality is when the company feels you are not needed, all that touch-feely stuff goes do…

> 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.

Re: Workplace Wellbeing Is a Scam?

#52

Post by goldcd »

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.

Re: Workplace Wellbeing Is a Scam?

#53

Post by granshaw »

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.

Re: Workplace Wellbeing Is a Scam?

#54

Post by mtberatwork »

kumarvvr wrote: post #28
JackPoach wrote: post #7

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 gotte…

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...

Re: Workplace Wellbeing Is a Scam?

#55

Post by fidesomnes »

mtberatwork wrote: post #50
kumarvvr wrote: post #23

Workplace wellbeing Wholesome workplace Workplace is a family and a myriad of other touchy-feely terms are just plain bullshit. Whole industries have cropped up to support the efforts of managements to keep workforces in control and deflect resentment (people don't leave companies, they leave managers ! and other crap) The ground reality is when the company feels you are not needed, all that touch-feely stuff goes do…

> 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.

Comrade, you were pretty slow about liking the latest BLM redistribution of property on FB, are you feeling a bit counterrevolutionary?

Re: Workplace Wellbeing Is a Scam?

#56

Post by [deleted] »

granshaw wrote: post #53

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 negotiation…

[deleted]

Re: Workplace Wellbeing Is a Scam?

#57

Post by barrkel »

Wellbeing, 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.

Re: Workplace Wellbeing Is a Scam?

#58

Post by svenghopeful »

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

Re: Workplace Wellbeing Is a Scam?

#59

Post by goldcd »

laurent123456 wrote: post #41

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 pr…

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?'

Re: Workplace Wellbeing Is a Scam?

#60

Post by toyg »

nicoburns wrote: post #49
JackPoach wrote: post #7

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 gotte…

> 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…

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).
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