I am part of a team in a high-pressure industry at a company known for demanding a lot but paying very well in exchange for availability, etc. We purport to provide near-constant availability to our clients, but it’s unclear whether this near-constant availability expectation extends to individual employees for their teams (depends who you ask, maybe especially depends on seniority). Whether or not it’s a healthy expectation is a totally separate issue — a lot of junior employees come and go after a few years, never expecting a promotion, but that’s the expectation.
I try hard to not drop things on others’ laps unless absolutely necessary. I take a few calls and answer emails here and there when I take a sick day but can still keep my eyes open, and usually work on the first day of scheduled vacations if I’m not able to wrap up certain things before I head out. My sense is that this is the norm around here, as it’s usually very difficult to transition work and nearly all our deadlines are considered extremely urgent. Then again, I completely recognize that this is not healthy or sustainable, and frequently commiserate with coworkers about how tired and miserable we are.
Some new hires recently haven’t been subscribing to this, whether it’s that they don’t realize the norms yet or that they have consciously decided to establish work-life boundaries. Some chatter on the internet suggests this might be a Gen Z thing. Whether or not that’s true, and I generally hate generalizations like this, I am conflicted. On the one hand, I completely applaud them for taking care of themselves and not blindly subscribing to unsustainable expectations. On the other hand, doing this independently on an individual level (instead of starting a broader conversation about work-life balance at the firm, which admittedly would go nowhere) sort of screws over other members of the team, such as myself, who have to pick up their work when managers don’t adjust deadlines simply because team members are out of office.
I’m starting to resent the people who assert more boundaries than I do and prioritize their own needs, because of the extra unexpected work it’s been causing me, but I also am extremely jealous because I know that I need to assert my own boundaries more but am just too worried about what others think of me. I know I have internalized these toxic work habits and need to stop … but also I feel like they are being inconsiderate.
What are your thoughts on this situation? I would appreciate anything you have to say on this, either philosophically or pragmatically!
Expecting any one person to provide near-constant availability should be a non-starter. It doesn’t matter if that’s traditionally been the culture of your company — it’s unsustainable, unreasonable, and bad for humans. It will exhaust people, harm their health, strain their personal lives, and make it close to impossible for anyone with health issues, young kids, or other dependents to succeed there at all. It will also result in worse work because burned out and exhausted people make mistakes, stop innovating, and generally do a poorer job over time.
If your clients really need constant availability, the way to provide that is by staffing at higher levels so that it doesn’t fall to individual employees to make that happen on their own. If it’s not worth it to your company to hire more people to achieve that, then at some level they’re saying it’s not really that important. Why should individual employees sacrifice on their own when the company isn’t willing to do something as basic as staffing appropriately?
You’re accepting this as just the way it works in your company — but it’s not some unchangeable thing about the work. It’s a choice your company is making, and they’re making it at your expense.
One of the most interesting things about work cultures with unreasonable norms like this is that they often become self-enforcing in exactly the way you’re describing your own feelings: you don’t like the culture, you recognize that it’s unhealthy and unsustainable, you know it’s making you miserable — and yet you are not okay with newer coworkers seeing it for what it is and declining to participate, and you feel they’re doing something wrong by maintaining more reasonable boundaries (the exact same boundaries you say you wish you could enforce).
They’re not the ones in the wrong. Your company is. All these newer employees are doing is showing the rest of you a path to a saner life. At a minimum, you shouldn’t resent them for lighting that path — and what if you even joined them on it? What if you just did what they’re doing?
And look, I know. When a culture like this is deeply rooted, it’s not as easy as just shouting Viva La Revolución and declaring you won’t be working evenings or on vacations anymore. Pushing back can have professional consequences for you. It can affect how you’re seen and what opportunities you’re given and what kind of relationship you have with your boss and other people who have influence over your career.
And yet … very often, the consequences that people fear for this kind of thing aren’t what actually happens. Especially if you have a track record of doing good work and have built up some capital, you might be surprised by how much room you have to push back and set better boundaries.
Some people do that by just quietly asserting their own healthier boundaries and expecting them to be respected. Other people do it by calling out the cultural problems more directly, pointing out the ways these unhealthy norms are bad for the organization and its employees (including its ability to attract and retain good people — like explicitly saying, “the world is changing and the priorities of the people we want to hire are different now,” as you’re seeing is true). I generally like the latter, but there can be good reasons for choosing the former.
Ultimately, though, this is the big thing to keep in the forefront of your head: your and your coworkers’ willingness to go along with what you know are unreasonable expectations is the thing that allows your company to keep imposing them. And if you see it through that lens, then letting yourself resent your better-boundaried coworkers is a tool of your own oppression. It puts you in a role where you’re policing — and in some ways enforcing — the very thing you wish would change.
If you can start to see that clearly, it might feel easier to at least experiment with laying down some of the burden you’ve been carrying and setting the boundaries you know would be healthier. I hope you will try it for a month, or even just a couple of weeks, and see what happens.
#resent #hires #setting #worklife #boundaries #company #Manager
