The stressful workplace: it's killing us

When I worked at Wang Labs during the late 1980's, the company was spiraling downward. In what was a stressful environment to begin with - overly bureaucratic, insanely hierarchical, incredibly cheap (when you traveled on business, you had to do so on your own time and you had to take the cheapest flight, even if it involved multiple stops and flying you 1,000 miles out of your way) - the lack of clear direction, the cost cutting measures, the habitual layoffs layered more stress onto an already dire situation.

To cut costs, they unscrewed one-third of the overhead lights. I guess that move had an upside: it was harder to see how dirty and rundown the place was. They also cut back on cleaning, which meant that they no longer emptied your wastepaper basket daily. Which might of been okay if it hadn't also meant not emptying the oversized, unlidded trash containers they had on each floor near the coffee machine. So each floor had a colossal garbage pail, overflowing with coffee grounds and lunch refuse like banana peels. Because none of us wanted garbage to accumulate in our cubicles, we emptied ours out in the communal bin.

And don't get me going on the bathrooms. We used to joke about contracting typhus. A (male) colleague reported that he'd gone into a men's room stall and found a row of dried boogers above the toilet paper dispenser. No surprise. When you neglect the physical environment, people treat it badly and make things worse. Broken windows theory writ large. One time, I found a desiccated tea bag, shriveled up in a corridor. Another time, while walking between floors, I had to step around a giant loogie that someone had hawked in the stairwell.

But even worse than the physical decay was the continuous fear of being pink-slipped. 

Before one massive scale and particularly gruesome lay-off - they had announced in October that the lay-off would be conducted and done with by December 1st, and, of course, they waited until December 1st to put it in motion - a guy on my floor dropped dead in his cubicle of a heart attack. He was about my age - late thirties/early forties - and had a couple of small kids. Financial speaking, his family was probably better off, given he likely had life insurance and the Wang severance packages were not all that great.

Wang was by no means the only stressful environment I've worked in. I've worked under undeniably incompetent and often malevolent senior management. I've reported to narcissistic aholes. I've had toxic colleagues, and toxic folks reporting to me. (It happens.) 

I've written about it plenty of times, going back to Pink Slip's early days. (All Worked Up, December 2006). In fact, Pink Slip started out mostly being about lay-offs and generally lousy working conditions. 

All jobs, I've come to believe, can be stressful. (Hell, pretty much everything in life can be stressful.) Working in a factory. Waitressing. Customer complaint taker. Every one of the jobs I've held has had their moments. But what made those moments and jobs survivable was knowing that it wasn't going to be forever. A crappy summer job? You can make it until September. A crappy professional job? The two most beautiful words in the English language are "I" and "quit." First runners up: "head" and "hunter."

Finding a new job is a common response to being in a terrible, terribly stressful job situation. You leave thinking and hoping that the next place you land will somehow be better. More functional than dysfunctional. Which, as we all know, is not always (seldom?) the case. The solution, it seems, is that there's no solution.

And we do need a solution, one Stanford B School professor says. He claims that stressful work environments - not just rat-race blue collar jobs like the Amazon warehouse and delivery positions have employees peeing in bottles since there's no time for a break - are killing people:

Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford School of Business, argues that work is exacting an even greater price than we realize. More than 100,000 Americans die each year from adverse workplace conditions, he says. And many more become sick. (Source: Boston Globe)

We're not talking OSHA type deaths and illnesses - the kind of accidental deaths that happen to lumberjacks and chicken pluckers. 

It’s a much broader phenomenon ― encompassing office workers, as well as traditionally high-stress jobs like nurses and first responders. Pfeffer estimates that “workplace management” was, as of 2018, the fifth leading cause of death in the United States.

“I think we are on an unsustainable path. I think we were on an unsustainable path pre-pandemic. The pandemic’s made everything worse, and something’s got to give,” he says.

Pfeffer says it's time to stop blaming the workers for not being able to cope with stress in any way other than quitting or dropping dead. Time to start making employers accountable for the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad working conditions in their companies. 

That sort of blame is absolutely backwards. The onus should be on employers.

What's causing all this death and destruction?  

People are working longer hours. They're under pressure to become more and more productive. (C.f., peeing in a bottle so they can work more.) The expectation that, in return for some flexibility - working from home, taking an hour off here and there to take the kid to the dentist - employers expect employees to be always on. Three a.m. e-mail? Where ARE you???

“The economic toll, in terms of lost productivity, lost good years of life, lost days, increased medical expenses,” Pfeffer says, “is on an unsustainable path, and it needs to be stopped. And therefore you need some combination of legislation, regulation, and litigation.”

...According to Pfeffer, the answer is to make employers take better care of the people who work for them.

He says that there are lots of reliable, tested, scientific measurements that could gauge employee wellbeing. And he makes a provocative argument: We should hold companies responsible “for the mental and physical health and the wellbeing of their employees. As you would do for the environment.”

“And if you make them ill, we’re going to fine you... If you dump a bunch of crap into the water, we’re going to hold you responsible for that damage. Same parallel. We should treat human sustainability exactly the same way as we treat environmental sustainability,” he says. 

...If, as a culture, we agree that the cost of workplace stress has gotten too high, Pfeffer believes that action will have to come from both citizens and government leaders.

“If you wait for companies to do this on their own,” he says, “good luck.” 

 Good luck is right. 

I know that Wang Labs was a long time ago, but they wouldn't even clean up a loogie in the stairwell or wipe the dried boogers off the wall.

Hope things have improved, but I have my doubts that companies, for all their lip service about employee wellbeing, will do all that much about it.

Hope I'm wrong...