At the beginning of this month, over America’s Labor Day weekend fittingly enough, two news stories broke that highlight the potential danger lurking behind our modern company culture. While people began to move away from this mindset during the COVID-19 pandemic, devotion to the job, to the company, to the workplace still has quite the hold on many employees. It’s a habit that in and of itself takes a lot of work to break.
There is a stark difference between being committed to one’s career and being committed to one’s employer. In some situations, these two can even be the exact antithesis of each other. Devotion to a company can be all well and good, as long as perspective remains clear. At the end of the work day, that devotion is not going to be reciprocated. Company culture can be a sparkling misdirection, but under closer scrutiny, who is really benefiting?
When an employee at Beazley, the global insurance firm, joined his coworkers for a hike on Mt. Shavano in Colorado to raise money for World Central Kitchen, he couldn’t have known that he would wind up trapped on the 14,230-foot summit overnight during a freezing rain storm. To be fair, that could hardly have been his coworkers’ plans either, but still, when they trekked back down the mountain, they failed to realize that they were missing a member of their group, and that this person was in danger of losing his life.
Chaffee County Search and Rescue–South, the group that eventually saved the lost man the following day, made a quip about some inevitable awkwardness awaiting everyone at the office watercooler later to the media. In all seriousness though, how exactly is one supposed to behave if or when they return to the office after an incident like this? How do we work with people who we can’t trust to have our backs?
When a Wells Fargo employee clocked in at the office in Tempe, Arizona on a Friday, her body was not discovered in her cubicle until the following Tuesday. While the company released a statement attempting to explain how both security and any other workers or managers in the office had not noticed their deceased coworker for so long, the union, Wells Fargo Workers United, released an outraged statement highlighting the hypocrisy of the company’s electronic monitoring and in-person work policies.
How can the argument be made that a return to in-person work is vital for employee productivity and company success when an employee could lie dead for multiple days in the physical office with absolutely no one noticing? How do the remaining employees arrive to work with a positive attitude when they know they could literally die on the job, at their desk, and it wouldn’t make a difference to the office operations, that their presence is vital, even when their lives are not?
It’s fitting that these stories broke over Labor Day weekend. These real-life examples, as horrible as they are, highlight what the unions and workers of the past already knew: we cannot rely on our employers to care about us. We have to prioritize our own physical safety, mental wellbeing, upward mobility, and personal values. As the month of September comes to an end, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s important to us in the end of year rush and striving for Q4 goalposts.
When companies refer to themselves as a family, this must be considered a red flag to employees or potential employees. Our families are our families. Our coworkers are our coworkers. If the company culture provides a proper work/life balance, then there should be no reason to blur the lines between the two, because they’ll each have their fair share in our lives. The workday can feel long, but life is short. How do we want to spend it?
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