Humanity Belongs In The Workplace
Designed by Sarah Healy
When The World Seeps Into The Work
As someone who likes using my daily work as a distraction from some of the jarring realities of the world, it’s been challenging to separate my job from current events. In writing about the state of the tech industry, I have become acutely aware of the pervasive fear associated with recent layoffs, mass unemployment, and the unraveling of significant gains in diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Knowing and feeling these anxieties are a shared experience that’s touched all of us in one way or another. Still, I have noticed many of us are hesitant to share or acknowledge how these make us feel. And I believe it is in our unwillingness to open up and display our authentic feelings that we perpetuate a silence that, ironically, makes us feel alone in these thoughts.
The foundation of a lot of conversation surrounding the sea of tech layoffs, for example, opt for toxic positivity, which can be understood as “the excessive and ineffective overgeneralization of a happy, optimistic state across all situations.” Instead of being honest about our stressors as they evolve with ever-changing times, many of us package up our worry in a smile that yearns to frown and spin some variant of “It’ll be fine” or “I’m okay.”
It is not uncommon to reward people at work for “powering through” times of personal or societal hardship with an uncanny lack of vulnerability. We are conditioned to believe that our humanity is a weakness that should never enter the workplace.
And herein lies two problems:
1. We’re not creating space for people to live a very human experience in contending with the often up-and-down realities of life.
2. We are conditioning ourselves to not own our truth which, by extension, prevents us from fostering meaningful connections that will improve our work and lives.
Why Don’t We Hold Space For Emotion at Work?
As women, we are conditioned to live a paradoxical existence. Throughout history, women and the virtues of empathy, compassion, and high emotional intelligence have been linked indelibly. Because of this association, women in tech and other predominantly male professions have been historically barred from entry and deemed “far too emotional” for such logical, rational work. Pushed to one extreme perceived end of emotionality, women in the workplace have coped for decades by subduing emotion to avoid claims of being unserious, unprofessional, and unintelligent. From joy to frustration, many come to work prepared to hide our humanity's natural ebbs and flows in service of the droid-like standard imposed upon us. These devastating psychological impacts are magnified in women of color and other members of marginalized communities.
Even beyond the workplace, our socialization since childhood into submissive roles in all relationships as partners, daughters, and students creates a proverbial auratic chamber that negatively reinforces us to remain disconnected from prioritizing our genuine emotions and thoughts.
Do you ever catch yourself filtering and manipulating your emotions before you even allow yourself to recognize what they are?
When was the last time someone asked you how you were doing, and you were fully honest about it?
These are just a few everyday situations in which we modify our truths to maintain a curated image or avoid potential shame/repercussions for being honest. Most of us are so used to doing this that it has become an unconscious practice we resort to as part of our daily life. By denying ourselves the ability to meet others with our emotional truths, we miss critical opportunities to build community and connection in times of duress and even in times of joy. From the lows of unprecedented layoffs to the wins we experience as a community when we achieve our goals and defy standards, we seldom hold space for authentic discourse that we can use as fuel to move forward and work through challenges.
Women’s Unpaid Emotional Labor
31% of women managers provide emotional support to their direct reports, compared to 19% of men. In the workplace, women of color are often expected to provide care to the whole team and be the unrecognized backbone for all DEI efforts (all the while performing our stated job responsibilities too). We are the same women who have been conditioned to believe being emotional at work is a weakness. Yet, we are consistently asked to soak up our coworkers’ emotions and deploy empathy even to those who would never reciprocate the support.
The difference in standards that men and women are held to has real implications for the jobs we seem most suitable for. Women are overrepresented in call centers and the service industry, primarily because we have proven better at demonstrating empathy and care to those we must serve. In a society where women are taught to prioritize the emotions of others before honoring their own needs and feelings, this doesn’t seem like some natural coincidence. It’s by design.
More than being unfair, it’s also incredibly exhausting to give from a never refilled cup. I am not proposing that emotional support be removed from work. Instead, I am calling out a glaring need to restructure the harmful patterns that lead to burnout, discrimination, and attrition. The truth is that everyone deserves to work in an environment where there are proper systems in place to support team members when they need it, but absolving men or those with the power to make systemic changes to the organization is holding us back. It’s keeping us from making serious progress.
Shifting The Culture Will Benefit Us All
Imagine the camaraderie and the unification we can achieve if we create space for open and honest discussion at the office and, most importantly, in ourselves. I find it quite dystopian that we are living through weekly layoffs in the tens of thousands from companies that at one time seemed impenetrable, and as tech workers, you are expected to show up and work as usual. For those of us who prefer to process change privately or in sanctioned settings like therapy, it can provide comfort to walk into work as if it’s just another sunny day, which is entirely valid. We all cope with things in our own ways.
But for others, working in environments where devastating current events such as mass shootings are not addressed internally can feel jarring and dehumanizing.
I am a Black woman from Buffalo, New York, who happened to live (at the time) less than 10 minutes away from the white supremacist supermarket mass shooting that took the lives of 10 Black community members on May 14, 2022. I was not in the right headspace to make trendy Canva graphics at work in the days following the tragedy, but I was afraid to take time off for some reason. But at that time, I was fortunate to have a team member who exercised understanding and empathy to overstand my need to heal and took the words out of my mouth before I had to do the work of explaining. And though they were the only person to reach out to me, I will always appreciate how they made me feel seen and made it easier for me to step away and tend to Gabby, the person, first. The work would always be there, but I needed to be with my people that day.
You never know when you will need a vulnerable, sheerly human moment at work, but I can assure you it will happen eventually. From the sad events to the gleeful moments in your life–you will inevitably decide to disclose, keep it inside, or ignore your inner truths. When that time comes, you might try to fight off that voice in you that seeks to elevate what’s affecting you with your direct supervisor or a trusted colleague. But I implore you to remember that you, the total person, deserve time off when you’re ill, understanding when you experience hardship, and a team that seeks to provide help when you need it.
Now more than ever, we need understanding in the workplace.
We need humanity.
