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Workplace wellbeing Wholesome workplace Workplace is a family and a myriad of other touchy-feely terms are just plain bullshit. Whole industries have cro

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 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.

mtberatwork 5y ago
> 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.
- throwamon 5y ago
  > 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.
  - chasd00 5y ago
    > 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.
    - throwamon 5y ago
      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").
      - TeMPOraL 5y ago
        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.
  - kumarvvr 5y ago
    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.
  - jstummbillig 5y ago
    Care to elaborate?
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    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.
    - chasd00 5y ago
      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.
      - AussieWog93 5y ago
        >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.
    - kenjackson 5y ago
      > 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.
    - ReactiveJelly 5y ago
      > 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.
  - srfwx 5y ago
    So more like "Family is a workplace" now that the other way around
- fidesomnes 5y ago
  Comrade, you were pretty slow about liking the latest BLM redistribution of property on FB, are you feeling a bit counterrevolutionary?
- climb_stealth 5y ago
  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.
- wing-_-nuts 5y ago
  >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.
  - Frost1x 5y ago
    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).
- ozim 5y ago
  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.
  - ganzuul 5y ago
    Family is just the wrong word.
- Viliam1234 5y ago
  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.
wiz21c 5y ago
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)
- mtberatwork 5y ago
  I believe from the company's perspective it's viewed as a mechanism for reducing insurances costs.
  - duckfang 5y ago
    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.
  - lazide 5y ago
    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.
tempodox 5y ago
Side rule: If you work in a place that has motivational posters on the walls, run like hell!
discordance 5y ago
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.
- chasd00 5y ago
  man bring "whole self" just sounds like bring your baggage and unload it on your coworkers. what a terrible thing to encourage.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

mtberatwork 5y ago

> 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.

throwamon 5y ago
> 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.
- chasd00 5y ago
  > 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.
  - throwamon 5y ago
    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").
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      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.
- kumarvvr 5y ago
  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.
- jstummbillig 5y ago
  Care to elaborate?
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  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.
  - chasd00 5y ago
    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.
    - AussieWog93 5y ago
      >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.
  - kenjackson 5y ago
    > 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.
  - ReactiveJelly 5y ago
    > 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.
- srfwx 5y ago
  So more like "Family is a workplace" now that the other way around
fidesomnes 5y ago
Comrade, you were pretty slow about liking the latest BLM redistribution of property on FB, are you feeling a bit counterrevolutionary?
climb_stealth 5y ago
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.
wing-_-nuts 5y ago
>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.
- Frost1x 5y ago
  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).
ozim 5y ago
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.
- ganzuul 5y ago
  Family is just the wrong word.
Viliam1234 5y ago
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.

wiz21c 5y ago

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)

mtberatwork 5y ago
I believe from the company's perspective it's viewed as a mechanism for reducing insurances costs.
- duckfang 5y ago
  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.
- lazide 5y ago
  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.

tempodox 5y ago

Side rule: If you work in a place that has motivational posters on the walls, run like hell!

discordance 5y ago

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.

chasd00 5y ago
man bring "whole self" just sounds like bring your baggage and unload it on your coworkers. what a terrible thing to encourage.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]