PEOPLE WHO WORK IN harmful, even toxic, circumstances know they are suffering. They feel the stress, understand what they are doing to cope, and in many ways are quite cognizant of the psychological and physical toll.
Not only that. They often join companies with some sense that they are not finding nirvana or anything close. When a young Korean-American woman, let’s call her Kim, with a degree in human-computer interaction, joined Amazon.com in their e-commerce department in Seattle, she knew what she was getting into with respect to the work environment and culture. As she told me, “I knew there was some negative stigma about the company, but it was all kind of hush-hush. You don’t really talk about that kind of thing, because it’s unprofessional.” Kim accepted the job offer, notwithstanding the information about a possibly unpleasant workplace, because of the prestige of the company. “Everyone says, ‘If you can work at Amazon, you can work anywhere,’ so I chose Amazon because of the status and because it was such a new and booming company.”
Soon Kim was suffering from workplace stress because of the long hours and the pressure coming from a chaotic organizational structure, political infighting, and a difficult boss whom she could never satisfy. She had headaches, stomachaches, and skin rashes. She felt bad about herself. To get through her depression, she told me she engaged in binge eating and binge drinking. Prior to joining Amazon, she had dreams of going to college, getting a good job, and contributing to society. “Once I was at Amazon, I was like, ‘I don’t care anymore. I will take any drug that comes my way. I will take any opportunity to, I guess for lack of a better way of saying it, feel something better than what I am currently feeling.’” Kim told me that Asians often look younger than their age. In her case, she said she soon looked as old as her mother.
Kim’s story is not unusual. One Amazon employee noted that while on vacation, she went to a Starbucks every day to use the wireless connection to get work done. “That’s when the ulcer started.”1 And it’s not just Amazon. Several people told me about breaking down at work, and the numerous stress-related symptoms such as headaches, skin rashes, and stomach distress they suffered. People working in toxic environments that compromise their physical and mental health know that they are not in places that permit them to thrive. Just like Kim, some people accept jobs even as they are well aware that the place won’t be good for their well-being. But they join, and stay, nonetheless.
A former senior executive at General Electric described how he recognized the negative effects of his work environment on his weight, health, and family, and had thought numerous times about quitting. He was traveling 150,000 to 200,000 miles a year and sometimes was away from home and his wife and two children for three weeks at a time. “What kind of company keeps you away from your family that long?” he said. The health-care company financial executive I have previously described was cognizant of the toll her long hours were taking and how her efforts at “self-medication”—alcohol, stimulants, and narcotics—neither solved the problem nor improved her health. In fact, I encountered very few people in my research who were not aware of the toll toxic work environments exacted on them.
All of which raises a fundamental question: Why do people, who mostly recognize they are working in harmful environments, nonetheless choose to remain?
ECONOMICS
One answer as to why people stay on in harmful work environments is obviously sheer economic necessity. Unless people have inherited wealth, they need gainful employment to earn the wherewithal to pay their bills. One person, working in a place where “everything was due as soon as possible, people worked late almost every day, and we had these dreaded weekly meetings where the CEO criticized our work with no constructive feedback,” nonetheless stayed because her husband was going through graduate school and she was the breadwinner. She stayed to keep the family economically viable.
Moreover, some organizations, rationally enough, decide where to locate their expansion sites in part based on where they can find available labor willing to work for possibly less money and not be too particular about working conditions. When plants and businesses close, employment choices diminish, and people have to work somewhere. Amazon tends to locate its warehouses in economically struggling areas so the company can tap into surplus labor that will be grateful for almost any sort of gainful employment. For instance, an article describing Amazon’s decision to open distribution centers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and in South Carolina noted:
The Amazon announcement represents this year’s biggest job addition by any new business to Tennessee . . . local recruiters and company officials note that the sites . . . were within a labor market that could supply the thousands of seasonal workers Amazon needs. . . . Around some Amazon facilities, “work campers” live in recreational vehicles while they perform seasonal jobs for the Internet giant.2
Amazon is scarcely the only company to make location decisions using this criterion. Surplus labor and the correspondingly low wage rates high unemployment can produce, as well as workers who are willing to put up with tough work environments, are features attractive to many companies. An Internet search for location criteria produces scores of checklists and articles, many of which, like one on siting call centers or data centers, list “labor costs and availability” either first or near the top.3
Putting call centers in places with lower wages and high unemployment and manufacturing plants in areas where other manufacturers have left also permits companies to take advantage of government incentives to open facilities. Such incentives include property and other tax breaks, low interest loans, and occasionally free land or even buildings offered by communities anxious to obtain employment opportunities. In Chattanooga, Amazon got the site for free and a deal that permitted it to pay just 27 percent of the normal property tax bill. Once the facilities open, the companies are able to recruit a labor force more likely to put up with difficult working conditions and nonetheless remain—because the workers have fewer options.
Thus, the stagnating wages and pervasive economic insecurity so much in the news makes people grateful to have any job, and all the better if that job comes with a good income and the status of being associated with a prestigious organization that will bolster your résumé. Other aspects of work, such as its effect on physical and mental health, can take a back seat to the need to earn a living.
COMPANY PRESTIGE AND INTERESTING WORK
A second, related reason to put up with difficult working conditions is to gain the credibility that comes from working for a prestigious place. As the general manager from GE put it, “I took the job because I had never run something that large before and I figured at the age of thirty-six, it was good to invest in my career. . . . And to be clear, I benefited from leading one of the divisions at GE. I come back to Silicon Valley and when people find out I ran a division at GE, they look and think, ‘this person must know what he’s doing.’” Kim explicitly mentioned the prestige of Amazon in deciding to work there, and few people I talked to did not, in fact, mention the reputational benefits that accrued from being employed by a well-known, prestigious employer, notwithstanding possible other negative aspects of their jobs.
Moreover, even in places where people were stressed, they were, for the most part, doing interesting, challenging work in their chosen profession. An event planner told me about the exciting events she got to organize, albeit under pretty stressful working conditions. The person who left the electric utility with PTSD told me that, prior to burning out from the overwork, she enjoyed being able to interact with local officials as she helped the utility in its government relations work. The GE executive enjoyed the leadership challenges he confronted in running a substantial business. A widow writing in the New York Times about her lawyer ex-husband who died from complications associated with drug abuse while working for a very prestigious Silicon Valley law firm noted: “He loved the intellectual challenge of his work.”4
People obtain prestige and do things they are trained to do and enjoy doing. So they stay. And they stay, in part, because they are not particularly attuned to the physical and psychological toll the work is taking on a daily basis, and also because they often believe—or convince themselves—that things probably would not be that different elsewhere.
Without in any way diminishing these explanations, people in all jobs and occupations often have at least some degree of choice. There are healthier and less healthy work environments in virtually all industries. And some of the healthier, more humane places to work—think Google or SAS Institute, for instance, often ranked near the top of best places to work and best employers for families lists—are quite prestigious and résumé-enhancing.
For example, the retail industry is well known for low wages, economic insecurity that comes from fluctuating hours, the scheduling software that makes people’s work time unpredictable, and limited benefits. Nonetheless, the Container Store, a retailer of packaging products and materials, has frequently ranked high on the list of best places to work. At least when founder George Zimmer ran it, Men’s Wearhouse, a retailer of tailored men’s clothing, offered higher wages, used fewer part-timers, and had an employee-centric culture that placed it on the Best Places to Work list. Costco, under the leadership of cofounder and former CEO Jim Sinegal, offered higher wages and more benefits than its competitor, Sam’s Club. It also created a humane work environment that caused people to stay for years in what is typically a high-turnover industry. Airlines vary in their use of layoffs and their demands for wage concessions. For instance, Southwest, unlike its US peers, has never laid anyone off nor asked for wage givebacks.
The point: some work environments are toxic; others, even in the same industry or geography and with equal levels of prestige, less so. Therefore, people have choices. People would be well-served to consider the health consequences of their workplaces as they decide where to work; this holds true regardless of their level of education, geographic location, or particular job.
TWO EXPLANATIONS THAT DON’T HOLD WATER
There are other economics-based explanations offered for why people remain at workplaces that jeopardize their health, although the evidence for these accounts is surprisingly scarce.
Economists and others who believe that people are rational argue that workplaces can’t be as bad as I’ve described, or people just wouldn’t stay. The concept of revealed preferences, originally developed for consumer behavior but subsequently extended to other choice situations, states that individuals, through their behavior in a marketplace (in this instance, the labor market), reveal their preferences.5 As Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen noted, the idea of revealed preferences makes it “possible to define a person’s interests in such a way that no matter what he does he can be seen to be furthering his own interests in every isolated act of choice.”6 Revealed preference, in other words, is tautological. So, no, people don’t reveal themselves to be masochists by remaining in unhealthy workplaces. Nor do they necessarily “prefer” where they work or not recognize the downsides of their work environments.
Another idea adduced to help explain why people stay in unhealthy places is that of compensating differentials. That idea maintains that even if people work in harmful environments, their compensation will rise correspondingly to reward them for the extra hazards and burdens they encounter.7 This account argues that people consciously and deliberately choose to earn more in return for taking more risks with their safety and health at work. There’s only one problem. Notwithstanding the intuitive logic of this idea, the empirical evidence for compensating differentials—that people get paid for the risks they take at work—is surprisingly weak.8
People fully comprehend the conditions at work. People know if they get paid time off and how much of their vacation, if they get any, they have used. Vacation and sick days are often printed on pay statements. When a high-technology executive’s husband complained to her about her travel schedule and work hours, this talented and intelligent individual obviously realized the family costs of her work choices.
I don’t buy the arguments that people are unaware of their working conditions—although they may not fully recognize the magnitude of the health costs they are incurring. Nor do I think that many individuals have somehow consciously and thoughtfully “chosen” to put themselves in harm’s way to earn a living or to receive (nonexistent) “hazard” pay for putting up with poor work environments. As growing research demonstrates, people are scarcely rational decision-makers—about jobs or much else.9 Instead, people get trapped, in a variety of ways, into staying in harmful work environments.
PEOPLE DON’T HAVE THE ENERGY TO LEAVE
Inertia helps explain why people stay in bad working environments. Numerous people told me that it often was easier just to stay where they were, unpleasant though that workplace might be.
Looking for a new job is itself a job and takes energy. People sometimes get trapped in harmful workplaces because, with not enough sleep and lots of workplace-induced stress, they do not have the physical or mental energy to fulfill their current work obligations and look for a new job at the same time. In a sense, the very fact that they are stressed and overwhelmed makes it impossible for them to escape the situations that are making them sick. A Salesforce marketing employee put it this way:
You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. I was not at my best. I was not on my A game. You have to understand, last fall you could have asked me out for dinner for Friday and I would have said, “Sure,” and a minute later asked you, “When?” You really think I was in a place to interview for and get a job and then hit it out of the park in the first six months?
The executive continued:
You have all this shame and embarrassment because you are stressed and think it’s you. I felt like my brain literally did not work. I literally could not remember conversations ten seconds later. I thought I was going to get fired. The reason I wanted to take a medical leave is that I had a really good personal brand, but the last several months I hadn’t been able to do a thing. And I was worried it was going to affect my brand at Salesforce. I felt I might be better off taking a leave of absence. I would walk into work with tears streaming down my face because I felt like, “I don’t want to go to work. I can’t do this. I don’t know how I will get through the day.”
In that condition, looking for, let alone finding, another job seems, and probably is, impossible. So one simple but important reason that people stay in harmful work environments is that they are too psychologically wounded and too physically stressed and overwhelmed to muster the energy to leave.
AREN’T YOU GOOD ENOUGH? PRIDE AND EGO
One GE general manager I talked to stayed at GE just three years because of the work culture. But his tenure might have been even less. On several occasions when he went in to quit, his bosses would ask him, “Aren’t you good enough to be a GE leader?” Of course he was good enough, he told himself, so he stayed, at least for a while. As he told me, once he started working, “There was a sense of ‘oh my goodness, they basically did not tell me what was really going on in this division because the place was a train wreck.’ So I have a choice. I can suck it up or I can run out the door. I decided to suck it up—that’s why they hired me.”
If you quit, you are, by definition, a “quitter.” Who wants to be known, even to oneself, as a quitter? His GE bosses told him, “If you were a leader, you’d be able to figure out how to get things done and navigate the environment.” The implication: If you were any good, you’d be able to successfully cope with the job demands and achieve success. So what’s wrong with you? And who wants to admit that they aren’t any good?
Kim’s first response to her growing sense of unease at Amazon: “What’s wrong with me? I started blaming myself.” Amazon makes it clear that the place isn’t for everyone, only for the best. The implication: if you can handle the work environment, you are good; if not, you are a weakling, a failure. In an Amazon recruiting video, a young woman says, “You either fit here or you don’t.”10 Amazon’s top recruiter noted, “This is a company that strives to do really big, innovative, groundbreaking things, and those things aren’t easy. . . . When you’re shooting for the moon, the nature of the work is really challenging. For some people it doesn’t work.”11 A news article about Amazon reprised the saying: “Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.”12 In a competitive, performance-driven, metric-obsessed workplace, you can either hack it and thrive, or you can leave—and thereby admit to yourself and your family and friends that you can’t take the pressure and that you aren’t good enough to compete with the best.
People prefer, indeed are strongly driven, to think of themselves as competent and efficacious. One of the more powerful human motives is self-enhancement motivation—the desire to think well of ourselves.13 There are numerous manifestations of this quest for self-affirmation. If people are asked to respond anonymously rating themselves on almost any positive trait ranging from sense of humor to intelligence to physical attractiveness to writing ability, more than half of the people in the group will say they are above average, a phenomenon called the above-average effect.14 If people are told they possess an unusually large amount of some personal attribute or quality, these individuals will overemphasize and overvalue the importance of that particular trait for success. Thus, people think they are above average on positive attributes, and also believe that the attributes they possess are more than of normal importance for success.
As other manifestations of people’s desire to self-enhance and think well of themselves, individuals think anything they have personally touched is going to be better and more successful for their having been involved in its development and creation. As I described in Chapter 6, when people provide feedback on the development of an advertisement, they view the (identical) advertisement as better; they view themselves as better managers, and their subordinates as better, too. Furthermore, once people own something, they value the item, be it a coffee mug, a pen, or a chocolate bar, more highly, simply because it is theirs, a phenomenon called the endowment effect.15 The ways in which we self-enhance, and the implications of self-enhancement for understanding human behavior, are numerous and pervasive.
Few people want to admit to themselves or others that they aren’t good at something, particularly if that “something” implicates their self-esteem. And for many people, work is integral to their self-concept and self-image. Particularly for people doing relatively high-prestige work in high-prestige organizations, there is no price too high or circumstance too difficult to face—because the alternative is to admit some weakness or failure. So, toughing it out in impossible circumstances becomes something to be sought, to be able to demonstrate one’s competence, energy, and dedication.
Consequently, the ability to survive tough work circumstances has become a badge of honor. A friend who at one point held a very senior marketing job at Hewlett-Packard described how he traveled 250,000 or more miles a year, mostly on American Airlines. He flew so much for so long that he had the personal number of a senior American executive to help him deal with the inevitable snafus of flying. At Amazon, Dina Vaccari bragged about not sleeping for four days straight to meet a deadline.16 Engineers in the Silicon Valley boast of their prodigious work hours, their ability to pull all-nighters, their ability to get the work done under almost any circumstances.
And the companies do things to help people keep up the pace. They provide on-site services such as cleaning, cafeterias, and car maintenance (and sometimes even cots) so that people do not have to leave the premises. They provide alcohol and food to ensure that people have the fuel to keep working. As one shrewd observer of high-technology companies commented, many workplaces adjust their food offerings to make it easier for people to keep going at a time when they might otherwise go home exhausted. She noted that while lunch offerings might feature salads and protein, “if you go to Facebook, look at what they give their people more of at happy-hour time, which is when people are going to start their second shift of work. It is going to be heavy fats, heavy sugar, heavy food.” It may not be healthy, but fat and sugar are useful for providing the temporary boost of energy to help people continue working into the evening. And of course, companies also provide reinforcement and encouragement for people to keep working—the promise of promotions, status, recognition, the occasional award, and so forth. And always the query, either directly asked or implied: “Aren’t you good enough to make it here?”
YOU CHOSE TO BE HERE: RATIONALIZATION AND COMMITMENT EFFECTS
Once people have made a decision, particularly if the decision is public—such as choosing a job, which someone’s friends and family know about—and voluntary, in that the individual wasn’t forced to make the choice, that person is psychologically committed to the decision. That means the individual becomes psychologically identified with the choice and its implications and motivated to continue behaving in ways consistent with the committing decision.17 Commitment is a powerful psychological process that can cause people to escalate their investment of resources in failing courses of action, to adopt attitudes consistent with their decisions, such as revaluing the desirability of groups and jobs, and to behave in ways consistent with their original choice. So, for instance, people who make a donation or take some small action, such as putting up a political poster favoring a candidate, will then take further, more significant actions in the same direction. That’s because once they have done something favorable toward a cause or candidate, the individuals are now committed to the implications of that first act—they must behave in ways supportive of the target.
Commitment implicates several psychological processes. A decision someone makes is “their” decision, and if we like our coffee mugs or chocolate bars because they are now “ours,” we certainly are going to like our decisions. Thus, people will stay with their initial decision to join a company because it was their choice. Another process: self-enhancement. If we want to feel good about ourselves, we certainly don’t want to admit we made a mistake or did something stupid. So that produces another reason people stay in a bad workplace and remain committed to their decision to work in a difficult environment: the reluctance to admit that they made a bad decision. Rather than admitting a mistake or distancing yourself from “your” decision, it is easier to rationalize the initial decision and the ongoing choice to remain. People are great, skilled, indeed consummate rationalizers.
One way of rationalizing commitment to a bad environment entails telling oneself that as bad as the current circumstances are, they aren’t going to be forever, and there are other reasons to stay. One finance person noted, “They were paying me crazy money and the job was close to home.” A consultant commented that we have it better than our ancestors and not loving one’s job is a “total first world problem.” I heard rationalizations that tried to make sense of being in harmful work environments, scads of them.
As one executive coach noted about why her clients put in long hours and made so many sacrifices:
The way most people rationalize it is, “I’m just going to do it a little bit longer.” “It’s just this one quarter.” “It’s just this one launch.” The truth of it is you can do that for many years. People are not sleeping, they’re shaking in meetings, they are not aware if they are breathing or not. They’re also often very young, so they haven’t had the consequences yet.
Commitment also works through people’s desire to appear steadfast and consistent. Consistency seems to be valued; the term “flip-flopper” is rarely seen as complimentary. And so, having made a decision, people feel bound to pursue it—including decisions about where to work. People who move too often raise red flags in future employers—what’s wrong with the individual that they can’t stay at a place? And the push for consistency also increases unwillingness to admit an error. So we believe things will get better, or maybe we are overreacting, or maybe the situation is not as bad or as harmful as it seems. All of which conspire to keep people working in environments that they recognize are unhealthy and harmful to their well-being.
SOCIAL PROOF: WHEN THE TOXIC BECOMES THE NORM
We learn what to expect, what to want, and what is normative by observing others. Psychologists described the concept of informational social influence more than sixty years ago, and it remains a fundamentally important idea.18 The premise: we are influenced by others because their behavior provides us useful information about what are appropriate attitudes and behaviors—and this is particularly true for others who are socially similar to us. As social psychologist Robert Cialdini has written, relying on social proof—what others do—economizes on cognitive effort.19 We just have to look at others’ behavior. And if we believe that others, the crowds, are wise and have thought things out carefully, relying on others to guide our own attitudes and behavior seems, and often is, sensible. Consider that the word norm has the same root as normative, and what is a norm and what is normative is, in the end, what most people do and think. In that sense, people collectively come to define a version of reality and certainly what is expected and acceptable.
The influence of others on behavior, with respect to work, is profound. As one high-level accountant who had worked in a financial job noted, “My parents told me to become an accountant and get a good salary and health insurance.” Numerous people I interviewed commented how their friends thought they had it made, working at a good job in a prestigious company. So quitting was difficult because it entailed going against the expectations of parents and peers, and telling themselves—and loved ones—that the “wonderful” job they had was actually making them sick.
Social influence is potent. A study of turnover in fast-food restaurants found, in some sense not surprisingly, that turnover was socially contagious.20 When some people in a facility left, others were much more likely to follow—and conversely, if few to no employees left, their workmates stayed. Even though fast-food work is relatively low paid and not very rewarding, people’s response to that work environment, in terms of staying or going, was affected by what their colleagues did. Similarly, people’s attitudes toward their jobs—their specific tasks—and their organizations are influenced by their colleagues’ reactions.21 If everyone else thinks a job is interesting and stimulating, then it must be; conversely, if everyone in the workplace thinks the job—and the boss—sucks, they must.
Social influence and the behaviors and beliefs of people in our social network matter. In some sense, no big news there. But the big news is in the implication. Yes, we sort of know that people who want to quit drinking need to stop hanging out with others who drink, and similarly for smoking and taking drugs. And we may have read that even being overweight seems to diffuse through social networks as people come to socially construct and define normative and appropriate eating behavior and weight. These same forces play into how, why, and if we tolerate harmful workplace environments. Surrounded by people who act as if long hours, an absence of job control, and work-family conflict is normal, people come to accept that definition of the situation. They acquiesce and stay, even if deep down they recognize the cost to their well-being and maybe that harmful work environments aren’t really “normal.”
Unfortunately, in the world of work, long work hours and other aspects of toxic work environments have become the norm in many places. So when people confront such environments, they see nothing unusual. Therefore, people feel odd about complaining about the same work environments their friends and colleagues are experiencing or leaving workplaces where others have chosen to stay. Furthermore, if work practices such as long hours are normative, there would be little prospect of easily finding a more healthful workplace.
Kim was told by one of her Amazon managers that he had worked for plenty of worse companies so, by comparison, Amazon was a great place to be. The executive coach told her clients that everyone was working the same long hours. Long hours, tough environments, are everywhere, and everyone is putting in the hours and putting up with the working conditions. So should you.
In fact, working impossible hours under unrealistic deadlines becomes part of the culture and how people define normality. As the executive coach commented, “When things calm down and people aren’t working until 2 a.m. anymore, they will literally say, ‘What happened to us? When did we get lazy? When did we stop working?’ That’s what I mean by ‘normalizing’—after a while, there’s this indoctrination, this expectation, that this is how you’re supposed to work and live.” The abnormal and the harmful become defined as normal, acceptable, expected—and even sought as a mark of success and achievement.
ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVES AND SELF-PERCEPTION
Implicit in some of the forgoing, but distinct enough to warrant separate attention, is the idea of the narratives we and others construct about situations (and, for that matter, people). Narratives help us make sense of our environments, and once constructed, we tend to assimilate new information in ways consistent with the narrative and disregard and more readily forget information that doesn’t fit the narrative we have developed.
There are two competing narratives about toxic work environments. One is that these environments exist in companies that are competitive, demanding places. Such intense, even stressful workplaces “must” be that way to accomplish the industry disruption and produce the economic achievements that such companies seek. This is the Amazon story told by some, and an account for why ride-sharing company Uber and its controversial ex-CEO, Travis Kalanick, are how they are. As Silicon Valley investor and commentator Jason Calacanis argued, “When you look at technology companies you can count on one or two hands the number of executives who have built a company from five people to five thousand or 50,000. . . . Uber has had to fight to even exist. . . . If you spend all your time fighting, sometimes you get a fighter mentality.”22
The corollary: people should be happy and proud to work at such places, and be willing to subordinate their own narrow, selfish interests and maybe even their well-being for the growth and success of the collectivity. As the accountant who had worked at One Medical told me:
I went there and it was just heaven for me because it had a mission. I really truly believed in their mission to make patient care accessible and health care affordable. I believed we were doing good. When I came to this company that was what we all did. They did whatever it took to make it work. We handed over our lives in exchange for this company succeeding. We built this culture of bending over backward . . . but we started to do it without really taking care of ourselves.
What I can say about workplaces and the toxicity of workplaces is that we have traded in the idea of getting a paycheck and the idea of success, a job title, and money for having any sort of meaning or any sort of life. . . . Being part of a mission-driven company is one thing. But purpose, like having your own meaning in life, is another. I lost all meaning in life for that other purpose.
This idea of giving oneself over for a cause has the virtue of playing into people’s desires to achieve immortality, or a version thereof, by attaching themselves to an institution greater—and longer lived—than themselves.
The counter-narrative is this: some companies are indeed toxic workplaces where human well-being, even human health and life, are subordinated to some leader’s ambitions and often to that person’s agenda for power, prestige, and wealth, as well as to economic performance measures that do not fully capture, if they capture at all, the human toll. In One Medical, “the leader of the company did not believe in taking care of himself. He really believed in sacrificing his health for the success of the company, and that trickles down.” But just because the leader is unbalanced doesn’t mean that every employee needs to lose their sense of balance as well. Under this narrative, it is right, indeed self-affirming and a part of people’s self-concept, to exercise their right to exit. And by their leaving, people might eventually compel changes to confront high turnover and its associated costs as well as to attract replacements.
The narratives often seem to contrast between selfless sacrifice for the institution and its lofty ambitions and selfish pursuit of individual health and well-being. Let me offer a third narrative, an account that integrates the two and makes taking care of oneself more legitimate: Once you are sick, incapacitated, or even worse, dead from harmful workplace practices, you won’t be of much use to the organization or yourself. So if your employer actually was interested in your unique and distinct contribution, the place would take better care of you, wouldn’t it? If the workplace truly cared about productivity and performance, it just might embrace management practices that produce both well-being and high performance and eschew elements of the work environment that degrade both worker and company well-being. And particularly for companies that tout their environmental or social welfare credentials, those companies might spend more time and effort ensuring that their own human systems, their own workplaces, are sustainable.
HOW PEOPLE FINALLY LEAVE
Notwithstanding the many psychological processes that induce people to stay at toxic workplaces, many do leave. In fact, virtually everyone I interviewed for this book had left a harmful place of employment. People left primarily under three conditions.
First, there might be a precipitating event, the straw the broke the camel’s back—an incident so outrageous that it was like a slap in the face that caused the individual to see the reality of their workplace. One person told me about someone she knew who had been called at a friend’s funeral to fly home to work. Upon arriving at work the next day, they told her, “Oh, we took care of it.” She decided she did not want to spend her life at a place that treated her that way.
Second, family (most often) or friends help people overcome their psychological reluctance to leave and will not countenance their rationalizations any longer. One person, working at a stressful place where they had gained a lot of experience and learning, which had caused them to stay, noted: “The final straw was when I went into work even though I was really sick. My husband basically sat me down and told me that I can’t keep going like this. I left as soon as I found another job.”
The person from GE went into work to quit one day but came home still working for GE because he was “good enough to be a GE leader.” His wife told him that he might be good enough to be a GE leader, but if he didn’t quit, he would not be her husband. That extricated him from the situation.
And third, people leave when they get so psychologically and physically ill that they simply cannot keep going. One person related: “I stayed on Wall Street because I thought I didn’t have other options because my skill set was too narrow to transfer and because Wall Street is such a bubble that anything outside it is viewed as ‘other.’ I eventually left because I couldn’t take the soul-crushing environment anymore and had a mental breakdown. I left to protect my sanity.”
A person left an electric utility when they went on disability leave with PTSD. Kim left Amazon when she was so exhausted and depressed that she couldn’t take it anymore. In that sense, people do leave harmful workplaces. But often only after they have paid a tremendous psychological or physical price.
STOP ACCEPTING THE UNACCEPTABLE
The human capacity to rationalize—it’s not so bad, it’s only for a while—and to make excuses—it’s for a good cause, I’m part of an effort to change the world (really, by letting people hook up more easily or have their pictures disappear or by being able to acquire more stuff more quickly)—is enormous. Once individuals have chosen a place to work, once they are surrounded by others putting up with the same insanity and apparently tolerating it, once they are exposed to the narrative that paints them either as loyal, hardworking, successful, or as not good enough, leaving is difficult. And that is true even if people know they are self-medicating, are putting relationships with family and friends at risk, and are ruining their physical and mental health.
So here are a few practical things to do. First, since we are influenced by others, find some people who don’t work all the time, who have relationships with their family and friends that extend beyond pictures on screen savers, and who have work that provides a sense of autonomy and control. Then build relationships with those people and spend time with them. They can provide the social information and influence that will help you make better decisions.
Second, recognize and then don’t succumb to appeals to ego (aren’t you good enough?). Be willing to admit that in choosing an employer, as in any other decision you make, it is possible to make a mistake and, once having admitted that mistake, to act to correct it.
Third, understand that, as many people I talked to told me, even after someone leaves a difficult, unhealthy workplace, the effects don’t immediately disappear. One person with a background in computer coding as well as consulting described the stress from the internal politics at Hulu. After she left for a new workplace, she still experienced residual stress and the lingering effects of where she had worked before. She commented: “I’ve discovered there’s this thing called baggage in work. It’s interesting what you do carry from job to job, so that even if you move to a healthier workplace, you don’t completely lose the residue of the bad experiences from the past.”
And most important, as you choose a job and evaluate your employer, recognize that in our workplaces, we need to emphasize health and well-being as important outcomes. Work is more than money, and money cannot completely undo damage to relationships or damage to your physical and mental health. Until people take responsibility for finding places where they can thrive, we can’t expect our employers to value health, either.