Being Human at Work

(Photo by Andrii Omelnytskyi at Scopio)

Ahead of applying for UK citizenship, I took a job. Yes, a regular job instead of a contract. For my visas and Indefinite Leave to Remain, immigration people here had a terrible time with the notion that I worked on a contract basis. I was fed up with that and thought citizenship might be a little easier to attain if I let them see what they find comfortable.

The boss wasn’t okay. I won’t go into depth about it, but part of the problem was his insistence that everyone should be able to shut off all thought or feeling about their personal lives while at work. He swore that he did. But one of his parents was dying and the farther that went, the worse he became as a boss. He was nasty, verbally abusive, erratic, impossible to satisfy, and vindictive.

He wouldn’t admit to how personal issues were tearing him up, so he couldn’t get any relief or support. He couldn’t even express what he felt. He took it all out on us.

I had citizenship by the time this approached its crescendo. I wasn’t there too much longer, thank heaven. He drove about a third of his workforce out the door in a matter of a few weeks. The company had been at the start of significant growth. It fell backward instead.

I’ve written about the impact of Long COVID on the workforce, the effect of COVID on people’s brains, and the need for businesses to adapt to these factors. As a practical matter, adapting to these changes in the workforce will be unavoidable.

What I may not have made clear enough is that adaptation can’t simply be cold, hard policy changes. People are people, not cogs in a machine. Far too many people have died from COVID, and too many are still dying of it. Far too many emerge from COVID with some lingering, perhaps permanent, injury. Maybe not fully broken, but not fully intact either. That’s a loss. It isn’t simply a dent in productivity, it’s a loss for them.

They may go through all the stages of grief, all the stages of adjustment that you would expect of someone who lost someone or who survived a life-changing accident or illness.

Everyone else in the household may go through all the upheaval of losing someone or living with someone who has survived a life-changing accident or illness.

This is familiar in the developing world, but in the developed world it has been so long since the last round of having it widespread that most of us don’t have much experience of how to handle it. We only have deep experience if our community has been through a shared disaster like a big flood or fire, a catastrophe of some kind.

How we feel will get into the workplace one way or another. We can try to suppress it. As with the boss who swept away much of his company rather than admit to being human, if we do that, our turmoil will leak into our work anyway.

Or we can acknowledge it and try to help each other cope.

We don’t stop being human when we clock in at work. We are human everywhere we go, even at work.

So develop new policies to cope with our new shared reality, but the policies are only an enabling tool. We are people all the time, even at work. We should treat each other accordingly.