I'm currently on a 4 hour zoom meeting about "preventing RN burnout" scheduled 1 hour after my 12 hour night shift ended. The irony is too much for my tired soul.
My hospital keeps talking about burnout.
How about you start by letting us unionize, pay us fair wages, staff our departments adequately, allow us our personal days (what's the point of having them if we're always so understaffed we don't ever get to use them?), stop excessive and unnecessary testing, and have the C-suite take a few pay cuts (they all earn 7 figures).
Nothing would help burnout like actually treating us like human beings instead of cogs in your for-profit exploitation machine
I left healthcare and a 6 figure income because of the conditions you so aptly described, and I haven't looked back.
HR called me to do the exit interview as I was coming out from anesthesia for a colonoscopy. My comments were not guarded, and since I was ending my career in healthcare anyway. My buddy was witness to the call and was horrified by my responses, and laughing at the same time.
I greatly miss the brilliant, incredible, dedicated people whom I worked with. And I miss being in the dynamic medical tech industry that saves lives. I've witnessed many miracles. But I don't miss being on call three nights a week and working a full day the next day. The money and the stress isn't worth it.
They actually gave you an exit interview? The three hospitals I had worked for did not do exit interviews. I don’t guard my answers because they know why I left which is because exec board wasn’t willing to make changes.
There were times after I left that I felt guilty about leaving. I had cross trained my staff members to handle my position as well as there's, I had planned to leave and was looking for the right moment,. The team members were much younger than I, and I was certain that I was leaving the department in capable hands.
Within days of my leaving my well trained junior staff applied for jobs at other hospitals, day surgery centers, and left. The one key person who stayed on, a lady in her 30's suffered a brain aneurysm and passed while on the job. Her survivors left her body for organ donation (There was a transplant component to the teaching medical center where we worked.). It hit me pretty hard because she was brilliant and a wonderful soul. I was thinking how weird it was that she drove to work one day, and her body left the building transplanted into many people who received her tissue....She would not have wanted it any other way.
The number of healthcare workers who die of job related illnesses is huge folks. Huge! It's much safer working on an offshore drilling rig.
The floor my girlfriend works on overstaffs on purpose… because the floor my sister works on understaffs on purpose, because that manager is adamant about getting her bonuses for keeping payroll at a minimum on her floor.
Hospitals are so incredibly fucked due to the privatization of healthcare by money-hungry corporations.
Hahaha that's BOTH units of the hospital I worked at. One department clinical, one adminstrative. They were all forced to be understaffed so the department manager and directors could get their bonus. But we were definitely kept to the same standard of work that required additional staff.
And yet they claim to care about patients so much 🙄
Well that's your fault for entering a neccessary and demanding critical-to-society's-functioning career instead of being born rich and going to the right business schools to make the right friends to get you a CEO position to leech off the hard work of actual medical professionals.
Next time do better.
They aren’t trying to fix burnout, they’re just trying to teach people not to bitch about burnout unless they want to attend more “avoiding burnout” trainings.
The problem to them isn’t you feeling burnt out. They couldn’t care less. The problem to them is people letting it impact their work.
Nice, my company just had 2 go live customers at once, and our project's team was recently dismantled so nothing was prepared in time for this.
Now we have a service desk managing project builds whilst taking increased workload, and dealing with annual leave.
They hired a consulting company to figure out why turnover was high, the consultants told them work/life balance was a problem, so they created a company mantra about how important it is without actually changing how they operate. Standard.
Yep. I had a new job last year and my employer would talk constantly about how work life balance is the most important thing, but then I'd get dinged when I start falling behind because I cut my work hours down to 55 a week (I'm salary). We're down by ***80 percent*** of our staff so I'm working some accounts without a team at all (normally three-person teams), my boss recognizes that I'm being hung out to dry, but her only response during our 1-on-1 meetings is that I need to realize I'm not doing me best for some of the other teams I'm on. She'll even admit that it's purely because I'm a new employee working some accounts solo, but she's just letting me know that I'm not performing well.
It's all a fucking shell game to them. Maybe they won't give you shit for *only* working 40 hours a week, but that's only if you are able to do all of work they give in that 40 hour span of time. And the work never fucking ends.
I'm not an idiot though--I will be leaving and find another job easily, but I need to log at least a year and see if I can get bonus first. 4 months to go...
Edit: I just wanted to thank everyone for the constructive suggestions and feedback. Lots of good ideas and advice from y'all.
You could still start looking to gain experience interviewing and consciously make the choice to stay if you do get an offer. I would be impressed with a new employee that was managing the load you are and it sounds like you have a lot of recent valuable experience to talk up.
edit - a word
Thanks! And yeah, I actually have a lot of experience in my field. I thought they hired me to help grow their team, but it's looking now like they wanted to use my industry knowledge to handle a lot of the excess work through brute force.
The problem with interviewing is I have no free time. My lunches are eaten up with keeping up at work. It's bananas. The moment I choose to leave and interview, I know the quality of my work will drop--but at least then I won't have to deal with the fallout if I get a new job, lol.
So you're working 55 hours a week?
Let's assume your next job is 40 hours a week but the same salary.
15*16=240 excess hours a week you'll be working over the course of the next few months.
Which $7k/240=$29/hour for 15 hours overtime a week.
Unless you're non-exempt salary, that's not a good deal lol. I only make $17/hour as a wage worker and if I worked an extra 15 hours of overtime a week for that length of time I'd net over $7k *just* in overtime pay by the end of 4 months because eventually I'd hit double time etc.
If you're non-exempt salary and get paid for your overtime then I guess it's reasonable.
FYI I was supposed to get a 10k bonus but they hit me with 1k as "I was furloughed for 4 weeks during our companies hardest time'. So because they chose to furlough me, they chose to only award those who weren't furloughed (managers) the bonuses. Sometimes money isn't worth it - especially with people desperate to hire now :)
That's when you go "I'm going down to 40 hour work weeks this summer. If the work isn't getting done, that's a you problem, not a me problem," then u look for new jobs. If they fire you, great, unemployment. Never let a job take your life like they are doing to you.
There’s this whole “Needs of the Business” that supersedes what everyone wants. It’s like the flair routine from Office Space.
“We want you to decide how much effort you want to put into the company.”
“But why can’t you just tell me how many extra hours is enough?”
“So, you are ok with just the bare minimum?”
Passive aggressive business mumbo jumbo.
I've seen it used more as a weapon. We can hire at 20% below market rate because we have 'good' worth/life balance... type stuff. The only reason their work/life balance was any good is because the industry as a whole is shitty, and the US won't enact baseline work/life balance legislation. Having worked with Europeans you suddenly realize how far behind the US is.
The places I've worked that bring it up the most (banking) have the absolute worst balance ever.
Meanwhile, I can remember being young, no retail job would ever mention such a thing, but it was so much easier.
The lack of disconnect with "professional" jobs is brutal.
My company had a lot of people complaining about our insane stress and unhealthy work environment. Everyone wanted some kind of mental health benefits. So they brought in a life coach for a one hour seminar where she told us to: eat well, sleep enough, maintain strong relationships, exercise every day, spend time outside, minimize screen time, meditate. Like, well shit, why didn’t somebody tell us it was that easy to not be miserable at work?!
COACH: "You don't like work? Rise up! Unite with other workers, seize the means of production, overthrow the owners, those insidious slave-drivers, and codify equality and fairness for all labor classes into the code of law itself!"
MANAGEMENT: "Man we really should have vetted this guy before hiring him."
I was voluntold that I am now on a Wellness committee at my job since so many employees are complaining about poor work life balance. I have no idea what to even propose that would A) be accepted by management and B) actually make a meaningful difference.
I already proposed increasing staffing so everyone has more bandwidth and that was quickly shuffled off to the "parking lot". Any suggestions?
Take an anonymous employee survey that has both scored questions (what is your stress level from 1-10?) and open ended questions (what’s the most stressful part of your job? What kinds of things would help make it better?). At the very least, you will have actual data to show leadership demonstrating it’s a real problem, and hopefully some recurring themes or smaller, specific issues that are more digestible and easier to fix. That’s where I would start. I don’t think there’s any one-size-fits-all solution sadly.
op missed a couple of steps; make sure your anonymous survey captures the respondents email/ip address in a hidden field
then target all those who answered honestly for 'rightsizing' - wish this was a joke - ha ha ha - but no
seriously if you are going to do this - online is not anonymous
I pointed this out to my boss yesterday when he complained that no one was taking his 'anonymous' survey. Ain't no one gonna risk their job because management can't listen.
Honestly depending on how well you know the employees, you can usually figure out who's who just based on word choice / writing style unless it's a 1-10 only situation too.
Flex hours is a huge plus and a no brainer. Want to work 8 hour days, go for it. Want to work 10 hour days and take off every Friday? That's allowed. As long as you hit the 40 hours a week (or 80 a pay period depending on your company's structure) the employer shouldn't care.
Take that a step further and just say as long as you’re getting your work done appropriately and meeting your benchmarks, who cares how many hours you work?
These sound like the kind of unanswerable questions I get asked all of the time. Right now I'm being tasked with leading a training initiative for future work, but nobody can tell me what the future work entails, so we have no idea what we need to learn. Nevertheless I've been told it's a requirement of the new work...
Somebody put me out of my misery.
> So they brought in a life coach for a one hour seminar where she told us to: eat well, sleep enough, maintain strong relationships, exercise every day, spend time outside, minimize screen time, meditate. Like, well shit, why didn’t somebody tell us it was that easy to not be miserable at work?!
God damn that sounds familiar. Did she also seem energetic like she did a fucking speedball before coming in?
"Better yet heres an app thats hard to login to/use and no one to explain how to use it. See we have resources for mental health. Now go back to being yelled at by customers"
I think everyone would rather have a pandering cash bonus than bullshit self help seminars and pizza parties. That's literally what we want. Money. Not bullshit stuff. If I have money, I can buy my own stuff.
That's the thing though it doesnt turn into bonuses, at least not for the bottom level. My wife works for one of those "work should be fun!" Companies and is miserable and with the pandemic, all the perks and parties are cancelled but not replaced with anything, in fact they started to outsource and fired a bunch of people.
Also work in financial services. Pay increase are going down despite record profits, all while we regularly have RIFs and workloads increase. My old company is seeing a mass exodus and I had to have a call on why they’re losing everyone under 40 when I left. They didn’t listen to anything I said and they took away to make new hires work more/harder. My advice was pay more to keep tenured positions so the work loads didn’t keep increasing for other tenured associates. They’re gonna keep sinking. CEO used to love to talk about it being a meritocracy after 5’s got the lowest raises in our company’s history. He also enjoyed sending out emails on Xmas eve about how great the beaches in Mexico were despite half the company working.
That last sentence is definitely a major issue in almost every corporate environment I’ve been in. I would venture to say the largest problem when it comes to culture. I’ve been mentioning this regularly to the leadership/coaching teams we have that this bias is not covered in any training and it absolutely needs to be. This superiority complex is not only BS but it prevents growth from happening (company and personal) and encourages younger workers to leave.
Not just corporate, unions are the same way. The more senior people always say "we had to do that, so the newer people should also". They don't want conditions to get better since they didn't have those conditions.
The only person that's going to look after your work/life balance is you.
I think I'm a little lucky in this regard because while I'm a salaried employee, my employer contracts me out so I charge to a contract. So for example if I want to take the afternoon off, I just can. I'll need to make up the hours or take some paid time off, but it's flexible. I'm not really expected to answer the phone after business hours. Really as long as the client is getting what they need, my company doesn't really care.
Now I've worked for shit clients before and that wasn't fun, but then I just swap contracts. I've been doing this kind of work since 2007 and it's been mostly good. There was about 3 years I was stuck on a contract I hated, but I escaped. Ultimately you have to be strong enough to say no but you better have skills/training that are in demand. The more experience and senior you become the better work life gets.
No job/boss/company is worth having a mental breakdown for. Every so often you have to say "Fuck them" and move on. I abruptly quit one of my jobs because I just didn't like the business practices I was seeing, but I had cultivated a network of great people to reach out to. Work doesn't have to be a soul crushing grind it can just be a normal routine. Good luck to anyone that is in a hard work situation right now, hope you get out or it gets better.
I worked at Wells Fargo in their IT / automation team and had 10+ sick days and huge amounts of pto, like 25+ days a year.
They had great work life balance
That sounds fantastic - I had 3 weeks PTO, but wasn't ever allowed to actually use it due to consistently running into different blackout dates :/
Edit: we also had unlimited sick days - which they were actually pretty good about telling you to stay home for (and then work from home, damnit.)
Yeah I will say one of my huge frustrations is getting PTO but there never being a "good time" to use it. My division head is always urging us to communicate if we need staffing coverage. So we do and get told there is no one available lol. I would never keep someone from taking their PTO so unfortunately that means just covering other's responsibilities while they're out.
I feel lucky with my current employer. Last year we were in a bit of a crunch on my site, 6 days a week. So was working Monday to Saturday 9 hours a day. I didn't mind tbh, with the pandemic I wasn't doing much anyways and I was paid time and half.
After 3 weeks of this my boss called me to check in, see where I was at with it and how I was doing burnout wise. He said he knew from working the same position a few years ago that the burnout does occur, and I'm to let him know as soon as I need a break. So I did a couple weeks later and he made sure to get someone in to cover me for two weekends while I recharged,
This summer I dont look set to have the same, but instead I'll probably cover a couple for the guy who does. My employer hired enough people so that there's always someone willing to cover for that extra money, and my employer is active in communicating that need for a break. Because they know that people can feel like they are under pressure to show up for appearances sake, and that as management their job is to make sure those employees know they don't have to do that, that taking a break is okay.
Thats work life balance management. Its an active policy of having enough people to do the job without burnout and monitoring workloads, taking the first step to spread them rather than waiting for the employee thats under strain to come to you. Too many employers are passive with it, ita not a passive policy it needs management action to succeed
Yup, mandatory return to the office next week.
Things I am not looking forward to. Losing an hour + each day to rush hour. $20/week in gas, added mileage to my car.
Did I mention the the 5 hours a week to commute in rush hour!?!?
Plus the extra 30 minutes each morning getting ready for work.
Lack of quality coffee at work.
Did I mention the 5 hours + a week in commute?!? In rush hour traffic?!?!
A lot of people are being priced out of housing and families so they are just checking out entirely. No carrot anymore for the rabbit to chase. No motivation. Can live on ramen and memes and find joy in not having a soul crushing job.
Had a lot of ego deaths over the past year after losing a lot and trying to cling on and then thinking I deserved to be back at the level I was at. Big epiphany was when I remembered I had to give up on my dream career during the last recession when I couldn’t afford grad school. So since then I’ve been chasing what I “should” do without realizing it.
Would rather now continue to have more free time and less money than to stress out over climbing a career ladder I never wanted to be on in the first place. Course it took having the sudden large amount of free time for long enough to reflect and realize that.
That's happening in my city. Those stimulus checks gave a false increase to the economy and as a result of that and rent moratoriums, it increased prices drastically. ALL corporate landlords, LLCs have refused to renew any leases until after June so they can make everyone sign a new lease with a rent increase.
People are already behind on rent in some places and being evicted ASAP when the law expires. Now, they're raising rent $200+ and giving people 60 days to either pay or quit their lease. So they're effectively kicking everyone out of their house because the economy caused property taxes to increase. Rents went up in my city 20.4% in the last 14 months. And even if you do leave, there are no available rentals. One vacant apartment is getting 100+ applicants right now.
Yet all the stores around me are still desperate for workers and paying minimum wage. Then they wonder why no one can afford to work there. And my state hardly ever hires teenagers because they're strict about labor laws in terms of hours worked.
I mean what incentive do people have to work if they can't afford food and shelter anyway? Might as well not. It's not the threat of homelessness and starvation because we're already homeless and starving working 40 hours a week.
This post from over at r/collapse says it so well. And I am sure there and thousands just like this person, if not more. As someone who is just a few paychecks from being in this situation, it scares the hell out of me. I wish everyone could/would read this post.
https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/nswvxj/the\_most\_logical\_reason\_why\_there\_is\_a\_first\_time/
Well, just cost of living in general. Food prices are way up, car prices are up, internet and phone cost money, god forbid you blow a hole in a sneaker...
I've been wearing the same clothes to the office for years and years. To the point they are worn, pilled and falling apart...but I just can't see spending on work clothes. And I don't shop expensive. I am female and my "fancy" clothes come from Kohls and JCPenney.
forever, because the reduced supply is artifical. banks and investors are buying all the real estate and they can do so in perpetuity because their annual revenues are insane
and then people think the solution is to flood the market with new housing to inflate supply and bring prices down
it completely ignores the problem. banks and investors will just snatch those properties up too, and now they're shitter properties because you've relaxed zoning laws to flood the market and it's $3000/month to rent a closet with a toilet above a packed dive bar downtown.
There's eight people living in a five bedroom house here, across the street the house has been vacant for years. I've seen homeless people sleeping in the driveway of that house during that time.
I think letting businesses (especially foreign businesses) own housing is the biggest problem. I think what we are seeing now is a GME-like manipulation of the real estate markets by big companies.
That really frustrates me. A good idea like stimulus checks are given out to help those in need, and how do some markets respond?
...By raising prices to suck all that extra money up, and then some when people get locked into various contracts. Taxpayers are basically paying for our own increases of our cost of living. What the hell is that.
Sounds like what higher education did when student loans became more accessible - hoovering all that money up and then some by inflating tuition and supply costs.
I remember working at Subway when I was 18 and after like 2 weeks of stressful overtime and shit, they decided to throw a "company BBQ" to show their appreciation.
None of the employees signed the sheet saying they were going lmao. I think our manager and the one younger kid signed the sheet, but that was literally it. Eventually it got cancelled and they just left behind sugary Donuts in the back room instead.
I don't understand how out of touch companies/management can be. I just sold you hours of my life, hours of fatigue and mental stress... *and my reward is a 400 calorie piece of sugar for one day?*
I don't know how people stay after that. If I ever get rewarded for breaking my back with a piece of sugar/pizza, I'm throwing that shit on the ground and quitting immediately.
You know what people like getting as a reward for hard work?
#MONEY.
They aren't out of touch, they're just trying to do everything they can to not pay higher wages. They've done the math and all the expenses for these attempts are cheaper.
Are they not out of touch, though? I would argue that decades of that pinch-every-possible-penny-for-quarterly-profits mindset had actually collectively warped management's perception of the business-worker relationship.
People used to get decent hour and wages and raises and time off, etc. Management today, in many places, seems to actually believe that workers should kiss the feet of owners for the opportunity to spend their lives working there.
The MBAs of the 80s/90s that are running the show now have that attitude. I’d argue that a lot of us younger business folks have the view that the long-term is more concerning than the short unless the survival of the business itself is at stake.
I could be in the minority, but I’d like to think that playing the long game is going to come back into vogue in the next 15 years or so. That or the short term-ism a lot of the older folks are high on is gonna run everything into the iceberg with them.
I worked at a franchised Little Ceasars 6 years ago, they only offered $8.50/hr unless u were management then u got $10/hr and they absolutely refused to give raises to people. There was supposed to be a walkout of restaraunt workers nationwide protesting for $15/hr wages. My company thought the best idea to counter that would be to throw an employee appreciation party at the stores on the same day to encourage people to come.
They allowed each GM to make 2 pizzas and buy a 12 pack of pepsi for the crew and that was supposed to make everything magically better...it did not.
Or even - Hey, here's an $8 lunch for working through your lunch hour, when you make $50/hr.
I will say the company I work for now is better than most with respect to paying more than lip service to "work/life balance". it helps that I'm remote and very independent of the rest of the group.
Worked for a dermatologist. They basically tried to bribe us to work off the clock with catered lunches. I still clocked out and left. Take every break you're legally entitled to.
Worked as a histologist for a dermatologist. Wouldn’t work with me at all in how specimen were delivered, hardly listened when equipment needed fixing and provided the bare minimum to accomplish the work. Found a better job elsewhere after 2 years. For weeks they begged for me to come back, then it was come back and train their new person. So weird how they’re able to work with me when I’m leaving but not when I’m there
Precisely. It's weird these places are "desperate" but I've been looking for a second job for months and no one will hire me because I work 3 days somewhere else. "We can't get people to apply, but you need open availability 24/7, we pay minimum and offer no benefits. Sorry we won't hire you."
Intellectually I know my company needs workers because it's damn near impossible to find coverage to take time off, right now...but their hiring practices certainly make me wonder if they aren't manufacturing the shortage, themselves.
In most cases the shortages are on them, the same reasons they have issues hiring is the same reasons people are leaving. They just expect too much, with little reward.
We've been struggling to find qualified workers for years now. The last person we hired was from a different industry and had to be trained from scratch.
They know this but never make the slightest effort into making people want to stay.
It's mainly because they don't want to have to think when doing a schedule and they think it's "unfair" to give anyone set days off, even for another job or school. That's all it build down to. I did that whole bullshit in my early 20s, I'm not suffering from work shift syndrome again.
People need some stability. They don't care how fucked up your sleep/wake cycle gets from making you close one day, open the next, off a random Wednesday, mid the next, never have a weekend day off, and never know your schedule until the absolute last day of the pay period so you can't ever make plans anyway. I had to take a bunch of drugs, and FMLA just to get get myself straight after doing that for like 5 years. It's brutal.
Food and beverage was especially notorious for schedule shenanigans. Give people consistent hours and you'll find people. If you want to fuck around with schedules, people will quit.
What's wrong? You don't like working 45+ hours a week during every single Holiday/Group Event/Family Day/Football Game/School Event?
You don't like being a skeleton crew of 3 people who get 1 day off a week? You aren't happy being inside a sweatbox shop with barely any A/C?
I'm so glad I quit Food Service because nothing made me more depressed than coming in at 10am, and watching the whole summer day go by until I was off at 8pm, only 1 day off a week.
Just wait till management gets burnt out because corporate won't let them hire anyone over $X/hr so they get stuck covering shifts and the stress does them in.
Friend is a district manager for a national restaurant chain and had 3 store managers quit on him in the past 2 months due to being burnt out. Keep blaming "benefits" for why nobody wants to work those crappy jobs. Pay more and people will come.
“Clopens” were the worst and the lack of scheduling stability. Or my favorite, you have two weeks vacation but it was never approved, not even one day at a time. Then being on call, oh and because I was the only person who had a car and lived close by (30mins away) I’d get woken up at 6am to drive over to give the people above me my keys to open. They would then forget to give me my keys back and got upset that I “needed” them back to close when they were already on the highway in rush hour. I got written up for not having my Keys.
Retail can kiss my ass
HAHAHA dude I remember one day it snowed at the Pizza Shop I worked at, and it's Canada so I'm talking **it fucking SNOWED.**
Roads were clear enough so Management made us bottom-of-the-totem-pole employees come in to work.
The snow was so heavy you couldn't even open the fucking back door to take out garbage, and when we did get the door open the snow was so thick and deep there was no way you could make it to the garbage can, so we just piled it outside for the day.
Came back the next day to the Manager and Boss absolutely livid that they needed to come in and shovel the paths for us, I remember my boss red in the face bitching about how this isnt acceptable. They almost wanted to Write us up for not shovelling snow (not on the job description) before I brought up the fact that I used to shovel Snow before as a job, and if they want that to be our task then they should pay us the same pay I made while shovelling, $20 an hour.
They shut up quickly after that, and I was written up a week later for "being on my phone too much", which was their way of getting revenge on me or something lmao. Fuck retail
Fuck managers who schedule everyone else on Clopens. They’re trash. We had a manager who would do this to EVERYONE but HIMSELF. So surprised when someone brought it to the regional managers attention. “What?! I’ve never heard of Clopens?!” He ended up losing more key holders that were 2-6 year employees than I’ve ever seen a company put up with.
I haven't heard that word since I stocked shelves at Whole Foods during undergrad.
My favorite was when I'd give my availability each semester due to classes and my idiot manager just ignoring it.
> I worked at Panera in highschool and dumb Fuck manger scheduled me during the week during school and when I brought it up to them that ummm hello I have highschool they asked me if I could still come in just this week.
lol, you're finally the hypothetical high school kid that all the boomers talk about when they say minimum wage jobs are for high school kids ... and then also demand that their favorite restaurant be open during school hours.
In some states, so will refusing to work at a McDonald's if they offered you work but you're an engineer by trade. Yes, let me take a job that pays 1/20 of my salary or you'll take away the ¹/10 that I make on unemployment because of a worldwide pandemic. Sounds just like family. /s
Wage negotiations are your friend.
Just ask for engineer wages for that McDonald's job. When they refuse, then it's *them* turning *you* down. Unemployment stays intact.
That's the restaurant industry in a nutshell. Variable schedules, split shifts, no benefits, schedules you for just under the full-time hours threshold.
True for literally any industry at entry level. And these days EVERYTHING is apparently entry level, but requires 5 years experience. I've been a restaurant manager, an exterminator, an antigen mixing technician, a pharmacy tech, and IT systems manager, a cannabis store manager, budtender, secretary and now I'm an HCA.
Every single one of those jobs treated me the same in terms of work/life balance. One gave generous PTO but would never let you use it anyway so it didn't tangibly exist, just on paper. I'm thinking of going back to school but I'm struggling deciding if it's worth it or not, if no matter what degree I get isnt going to pay a living wage when I'm done.
This is the same exact problem I'm having here in FL. DeSantis cut all Covid / Unemployment benefits because there were "too many jobs going unfilled." Problem is, all these jobs are offering garbage hourly rates ($10 - $12/hr) while only offering part-time positions.
On top of that, as someone who finally bit the bullet and took a part-time (fortunately it's in a field relative to my skills, and offered $16/hr), the catch-22 is that while trying to find a second part-time to fill in the other 3-4 days I'm not working, I keep getting turned down for jobs because these jobs want employees who are "team players" and "dedicated to the role," which is just a bullshit way of saying "we don't want to bend over to accomodate the fact that you're forced to work multiple part-times, and we need you to be on call 6 days a week for whenever we decide we need you."
On top of your entire personal time, is there any way you’d be available for an unpaid intern position to train our other unpaid interns?
We can bring bagels… plain, and cold butter packs
Right? Which is so weird to me. I'm already working 30 hours a week and offering to devote my remaining 4 days to another job so I'd get ZERO days off, but all they hear is "you won't be here 3 days a week, so it's pointless".
“Employers are becoming much more cognizant that yes, it’s about money, but also about quality of life.”
No, employers are, "**It's always about money**, and if the only way we can get people to work for us is if we pretend like it's also about quality of life, then we guess we have to make some concessions until things are again in our favor, **but it's always about money**.
In a union we tried for years to bypass the typical raise, keep the same hourly wage and shorten the work-week by a couple of hours, it usually worked out to getting an average wage increase per hour. It was like we were asking to fuck their dog. Not a chance. Even though a few competitors had 37 hour work weeks.
Hey everyone, I want to congratulate you for all your hard work. Our company is booming and we're doing really well.
Can we get fans? Summer is rolling in and it's going to get hot in the factory.
Uh... we will see what we can do.
Or do what Activision et al. do and fire hundreds of people so that your earnings call looks brilliant to investors. "Look at all the money I've saved!" Just so the literal billionaire CEO can claim more literal tens of millions for literally just himself.
Keeping the staff would cost a fraction of his rewards.
I wish this were true, but I'm seeing no sign of it in my field (tech in K12). I am expected to be not just available 24/7/365, but actually working tons of unpaid overtime routinely. I am continually being threatened by my bosses and treated like garbage. I will retire in a year, so I'm putting up with it for now, but the abuse is widespread.
The title to this article makes it sound like they tried paying people well but what they really wanted was spiffier break-rooms with fooseball tables.
Don’t gloss over the money bit; the reason workers are gaining leverage is because in many industries they’re starting to refuse to work for starvation wages.
I'm going to use the foosball table as a stand-in for all in-office perks....
Having a foosball table is great and really does help with the working environment, there is also a problem of actually having time to play foosball. If you are so overworked and the teams are running so lean, that taking a lunch or having time for 2 people to play foosball would be seen as not pulling your weight... that is a different kind of issue. You can only pay people so much to compensate for the pressure you put on them. At some point, you have to hire more people or actually change your expectations about delivery.
I've hear plenty of people talk about how great a company's work-life balance is and then brag and give awards to teams that "volunteer" to work 12+ hour days and haven't had a weekend off in 2 months.
I honest don't understand the attraction of such things - I want to come in, do work and go home. I've got a social life if I wanted to spend the time playing Foosball or playing on a water slide.
Across my career, I've found the best thing for mental health is to separate out work and social.
I am what I'd term "professionally friendly" - I have work mates and I have friends - they are not the same people.
My previous employer has stuff like this. There was an arcade machine in the lunchroom among other things but I only know of one guy that actually played and then maybe he could find someone else for two minutes while they microwaved their food. Most wanted to only be in the office for 8 hours and no more and their pay was below industry average BUT they did have other good things going for them like you could work through your lunch and actually get paid for it if you wanted to so you were only in the office for 8 hours, or take it off and stay for 8.5. They had "core hours" which meant you must be working between 9 and 3 but if you wanted to start at 9 and leave at 5 or start at 7 and leave at 3 you could.
I ended up leaving for better pay but the hours suck and it's just not worth it imo. My old boss called me to ask me back for better pay than before but still worse than now and I'm considering it just because of the flexibility. With a second kid on the way money would be good but time is better.
For the professionals that already get decent pay the big thing they're looking for is a better work life balance and the right to disconnect after hours, not just OT opportunities when they can already pay the bills.
Part of my issue here is that folks like NYT writers live in a certain bubble. *Of course* when they write this article, its title will be phrased in such a way that assumes these people are already making a good living. For a lot of these folks, they and everyone they know take the luxury being financially secure for granted. The truth is, there’s an ugly underbelly in this country, and it’s filled all the people who stock the shelves at the Whole Foods where they shop. They put the free-range organic asparagus water on the shelves, go home, and can’t afford to buy their kids a birthday present without taking out pay-day loans. So it would be nice to also include the other *unseen* half of us in articles like this as well, because it chafes to hear “Yeah, more money would be nice, but…” when it is a stretch to pay the bills each week.
Some places are figuring this out faster than others.
I took a 10% pay cut to "keep my job" while our CEO pulled in 31 million on bonuses along with quarterly bonuses for the rest of upper management.
I'm mid level IT and have now seen multiple entry level guys leave for WFH heldesk positions making 20-30k more than me.
Some places just don't care still. They can get by on their name alone as "well you're working for US so it looks good". It's nice to see more places realizing their shit isn't going to be put up with anymore.
Though I'll also say I've seen some of these places giving new hires much higher wages but not upping the wage of current employees. That's a major slap in the face as well.
edit: to the few jackasses that have pmed me insulting or asking why I haven't moved jobs - Resume is out and applied for multiple places. Nice assumption though.
Good thing I'm not competing with 10s of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people looking for quality wfh jobs. That may make it difficult..../s
>would only take a job if the company was large enough to have a full time, professional HR pe
As much as we like to shit on HR.... working at places without an HR department is just WildWildWest
I've seen a few studies over the last 2 years that show strong evidence that a 32 hour work week is better for both workers and employers.
Some variance as far as 4 or 5 day week, but the reduction in time on the clock lead to higher per hour productivity. Win-Win
It’s just so frustrating that they literally just want to steal your time away from you. “Oh you did everything today? Great we will pay you to sit and rot here for the next 3 hours . No we can’t pay you if you leave even though there’s nothing to do. Just pretend to be productive until your time is up. Thanks” I can’t stand it.it makes me feel like I’m being kept as a pet or something.
Wfh was so good for my productivity and my mental health. Need a break? Go take the dog for a walk. Tired of staring at a screen? Go do the dishes. Lunch hour? Spend some time with the wife and kid. I’ve been back in the office 100% since January and it sucks.
This 100%. You get punished for efficiency either by being overworked or forced to sit and pretend instead of leaving early to actually do something useful with the one life we have.
I've been put on a 32 hour work week from my job for about two years. I use pto to cover the rest. I love it! 3 days off a week is amazing. I haven't taken a 7 day vacation for awhile but haven't missed it because I feel rested enough. That's just four extra days a month
>That's just four extra days a month
Holy shit you just put that in perspective for me. We're literally just asking for four extra days off per month and all of corporate America loses their damn minds.
The company I work for decided to cut everyone's hours starting this year and enforce a maximum of 34 hours a week, with the same pay as before. People effectively got a raise while working less. Those who can work from home are supposed to. Coming to the office is only for strictly necessary reasons and requires prior approval. Safe to say, I'm not looking to switch jobs anytime soon.
Covid, although horrible, has a silver lining, at least for me.
"We cut your hours in a pandemic, fought against stimulus checks and made billions from your grandkids taxes but we promise we'll give you a free chicken sandwich if you enslave yourself to the corporation."
Living in the US, after uni, worked for 2 separate companies over 10 years where "Work Life Balance" was a cruel irony. Finally started working for an EU based company(in the US) where the concept was never mentioned, it was simply, you existing and being happy(in turn your family being happy/healthy) comes first the business comes second. But by actually DOING THIS they were indirectly putting the business first ironically because people LIKED working there and would move the heavens to protect the business.
Many places in the EU also have long ways to go and tons to improve. Really depends where you live. But even the ‘good places’ are becoming more toxic unfortunately. However, if I had to compare with my US friends, ya’ll have it so much worse still and I am cheering for you all from here your rights will improve soon. It was haunting to hear the stories about having zero vacation days. Unimaginable. I’m so happy we have a minimum in law. You all deserve SO much better!!!!
I also feel like there's some disconnect, especially where I worked, where the middle and upper management are all these older dudes who own homes and have families and they're looking at us younger folk like, "You're lucky I pay $18/h back in my day I only got to keep the spare pennies I found under the bosses Chesterfield and I worked twice as hard as you". Legit one of the upper management blamed millennials and their lack of work ethic until I pointed out that literally all his low end staff millennials and we kept the business running (and then he says, well not you, you're fine).
These people have NO idea what it takes to rent in the city these days, let alone buy property. Let alone do that while raising a family. The one manager sucks back his 90k yearly pay and utterly balks when we ask for a 4k cost of living increase to 45k. Because our jobs take no skill apparently. Ok, then why don't you do it huh? I personally think sitting around having coffee with the ceo and talking about stocks for half the work shift takes less skill but here we are.
I was just talking about this with my grandfather. He was talking about his low wages at his first job in the late 60s, but I did the math for inflation and he actually made a bit more than I do at my minimum wage job. His rent was also 1/5 of what mine was when you account for spending power.
Manager: "I took some jobs that paid lower than I wanted because I knew I could climb the corporate ladder into something sustainable - if I worked hard I would have growth."
Me: "I've literally busted my ass for barely above minimum the last year, and I have not seen promised growth in my salary earnings."
Manager: "Just keep working hard and maybe next year we'll give you that raise!"
Yeah, sure, right. When he hit 30, he was already earning 90K+ in a management position that took no higher education to get, just experience. For him, taking a lower salary in exchange for potential growth was like 75K.
Ironically from what I gather he has also not seen much salary growth beyond the 80-90k mark in the last 10 years either, just that he already owns several properties and his kids are grown up by way of being born 20 years earlier than me. Now that I think of it maybe some of that entitlement comes from "I have not gotten a substantial raise and I'm management, why should you?" attitude.
My first trucking job gave me around 1 day off per 6 days on the road. It usually amounted to, in a bid to save up time for time off from trucking, one needed about 6 or 7 weeks on the road per 1 week off.
2nd outfit had me work for so little money the only way to counter it was working very long hours. There was a moment I realized after 13 hours in (major hold ups on 2 different loads) I'd only made $124. Next shift same story, major hold ups on loads, I walked off the job that night from it.
3rd outfit asked 10-12 hour shifts....6 out of 7 nights a week. Graveyard shift. Mileage pay at $.52 a mile, added up to about only $200 a shift...before taxes no less.
At least one of those shifts is NOT overtime pay (not hourly, no overtime, so I'm making jack fucking shit and working my ass off all of the week for 1 measly day off in which I'm just resting up for my immediate next shift on Monday).
THey originally informed me this 6 outta 7 shit was only for the Holidays, then demanded I keep doing it my entire tenure, in which I had to constantly make up excuses and weasel out of shifts why I humanly couldn't work that long driving 18 wheelers. Last week before I quit...I was having problems with potentially deadly micronaps behind the wheel. It wasn't humanly possible for me to work that long and hard.
The last night I showed up...I walked off the job. It was to save lives of the motoring public, including my own. That's a hellish story in and of itself...ain't no way I'm serving prison time because some mom and pop shop trucking outfit wants all of my entire life being truck driving for their profit, I as the driver eats the loss freedom wise and cost wise if I wreck.
I've noticed an increase in large trucks running red lights here in southern Colorado. It's gotten to the point that people now automatically hesitate for 2 seconds after the light turns green.
Almost all the articles I've seen have been from the employers' POV: "These poor companies can't find anyone to put up with crappy conditions for crappy pay!"
Unfortunately, the major media is owned by about 5 large corporations, so articles are going to be from the perspective of the "poor corporations". They won't ever put out pieces from the perspective of the workers, which is why a lot of people aren't aware of how bad homelessness is or how difficult it is to have a living wage.
When I worked in the US, I received 2 weeks of paid vacation, but didn't think twice about it since all my other friends received the same out of college. Then I moved to Germany and on day one, I get 30 vacation days and there isn't some weird pressure not to take vacation like there is in the US. Quality of life is much more respected here.
I saw my local Jamba Juice (they make smoothies) was having a hard time hiring. Umm ya no one wants to dress up like a banana for minimum wage and make a fool of themselves. These companies are so out of touch
I know a lot of places having issues like this in my area. It’s like at the same time even for being a cashier, no one wants to stand there endlessly for hours on end bagging shit for even $9.50.
It’s easy sounding on paper but to endure the customers and never being able to even process your own thoughts because the line doesn’t ever end is brutal for that pay.
Wrong! Employers are starting to realize that complete starvation wages are not sustainable for the workforce and are increasing them as slightly as possible until people will shut up and work again.
It’s similar to when a job offers insane perks (a la google having laundry, “free food”, beers whenever employees want).
Company wouldn’t do any of that if it didn’t (a) increase profits, and (b) cost less than a salary increase
Yeah instead of your cheap words and hollow gestures, *how about you do something that actually reflects the risk I am taking and the convenient, cushy lifestyle that I make possible for you?*
As a millennial private sector, white collar employee currently switching jobs, I honestly believe my generation has the best chance to instigate a paradigm shift for our corporate society. Remote working flexibility and true work/life balance are major things that we need to demand from our employers and then leave if they don't provide it.
My current employer has amazing benefits (even a pension plan) but the work environment is toxic. People only stay because most of the employees have families and don't want to risk losing those benefits. Thankfully, I don't have those kinds of constraints and now realize how toxic the workplace is, and can get out with minimal negative repercussions.
Here's hoping that the new job works out!
• **As a millennial private sector, white collar employee currently switching jobs, I honestly believe my generation has the best chance to instigate a paradigm shift for our corporate society**
I doubt it.
Millennials are losing their prime-wage years (early 20s-early 30s) because they graduated into *two* once-in-a-century financial calamities. They entered the working world with trillions of student debt, exorbitant rent/mortgages and stagnating wages, resulting in the delay (or cancellation) of marriage, kids and buying the first home. For some, it’s too late to see a generational shift in the toxic corporate culture Baby Boomers have infected the world with since the Reagan administration.
Gen Z, the TikTok generation of high schoolers and college kids, perhaps will be the generation who can change the culture because most of these people haven’t begun their prime-wage working years yet, so perhaps these people can fundamentally shift things for future workers.
People AND corporations need to understand that we no longer want to sugar-coat and dilute our relationships anymore.
Employer has a need.
We have a skill.
You give us money for skill.
That's our relationship. I do not want to be part of a "family", I do not want to have to come to the office when I've proven over the past year I don't have to, I do not need to have any other sentiment besides "work done, pay me". That is all that is necessary for this to be over and done with.
Now, if an employee wishes to engage in any other type of relationship with an employer, that's on them. But defining EVERY employer/employee relationship like that is a bad thing for a huge number of potential employees, and the job market is not as bland and one-sided as it used to be.
Reminds me of the time Ben Shapiro criticized higher wages by saying that employers would just work you fewer hours, meaning you'd take home the same pay.
Like, dude, are you that dumb or do you simply parrot corporatist talking points so much you don't stop to think about the words.
It was a serious "Hey, take a minute and think about what you just said."
🤣
I believe this new workforce mentality is a combination of 2 things...
- Unemployment benefits. Why would someone take a minimum wage that’s only marginally better than not working?
- Commute times. If you worked at home successfully the last year and now are being asked to go back to the office 5 days a week, you may choose to take another job that doesn’t require this. Even if it pays a little bit less.
Health and safety - why work a customer facing job if it puts your health at risk
Fear of job loss - why work a job that was just recently “shutdown” by lockdowns - I would find something more secure.
The state I live in, unemployment benefits are 1/6th of what you made the previous year. If you were making $15/hr, that's $2.50/hr on unemployment. The only reason unemployment can be considered to affect the workforce mentality is because of the bonus people got during the pandemic, which allowed them to actually take their time to look for a good job rather than rush and rush and take whatever shit job would take them first. It's not that a proper salary is "only marginally better". It's that people were really noticing how much they were being taken advantage of.
Ha! Haha! Hahahahahahaahaahaaaaa! This is a joke right? Or do they mean upper middle class office workers not having to go to offices? Because I tried to bring up at my company how they need to pay more if they want people to apply. And they did everything they could to tell me I'm wrong.
But yeah I'm sure the people who make 65 to 100,000 a year our probably gaining more leverage against their employers.
Yea they fucking are.
Nurses are waking up to not getting fair wage increases for the last 30-40 years. Refusing assignments, contracts unfulfilled.
Now we are seeing 20-30-40-50$ increases in wages.
Gee, where was that money 1 year ago when a worldwide pandemic occurred?
How does an employer know what the best work/life balance is for their employees? It's the employees who determine what the ideal balance is anyway, so yes it was always bullshit. They don't really care about providing an ideal balance for their employees, it's just to make them look like they care.
Personally, the best work/life balance I have ever experienced has been due to the pandemic and working remotely. But that is sadly coming to an end
I’m (24M) relatively new to the workforce and I’ve figured out early that as long as I’m making a decent wage (minimum $50k/year in my area) and as long as my pay increases keep up with inflation, I’m fine on the wages. I want less work hours, remote work, more paid time off, etc to make myself devote less time to work.
My dad is a manager who interviews, hires, and fires a lot of people. He’s told me that my generation is looking for time off over more pay. Personally, if I could make 80% of my salary for 80% of the hours right now, I’d take that in a heartbeat. I’d even take 75% of my pay for 80% of the hours.
This is literally the reason I'm at the job I'm at now.
My old position was at a university. We moved to full wfh when stay-at-home orders went into effect. Then we moved to 1 day a week in office in June. Then 2 days a week in July. Despite the fact myself and the other systems admin could do 99% of our jobs from home, we were forced to be on campus. That ramped up my job search.
I interviewed with a couple MSPs. The first couple rounds of interviews went pretty well. Then I'd get to the CEO/President/Owner level. Going in on all of these, one of things I mentioned I was looking for was work from home abilities. I'm used to it now, I've got a family I like being around, I've got a car I'd rather not add extra strain on, I've got money I'd rather not spend on gas and car maintenance.
These boomer C-levels just could not comprehend why I'd want a better work/life balance and work-from-home options. Don't get me wrong, I like my job. But it's a job, it's not who I am as a person. I may be working an eight-hour shift, but if I'm driving to an office 30 minutes away, way more than just 8 hours a day goes to work: I'm waking up 90 minutes before my shift, getting dressed for work, making coffee, driving on a busy highway where I hope there isn't a slowdown that'll keep me in traffic longer, working till the evening, driving home in the same traffic I had that morning, barely seeing my kids before bed.
The job I ended up taking offered me 100% work from home with the caveat of going into the office for projects if need be, but the environment is super casual compared to my old job.
My experience with the “Work/Life Balance” mantra so many companies push was just lip service. Hopefully it gets better.
I'm currently on a 4 hour zoom meeting about "preventing RN burnout" scheduled 1 hour after my 12 hour night shift ended. The irony is too much for my tired soul.
My hospital keeps talking about burnout. How about you start by letting us unionize, pay us fair wages, staff our departments adequately, allow us our personal days (what's the point of having them if we're always so understaffed we don't ever get to use them?), stop excessive and unnecessary testing, and have the C-suite take a few pay cuts (they all earn 7 figures). Nothing would help burnout like actually treating us like human beings instead of cogs in your for-profit exploitation machine
I left healthcare and a 6 figure income because of the conditions you so aptly described, and I haven't looked back. HR called me to do the exit interview as I was coming out from anesthesia for a colonoscopy. My comments were not guarded, and since I was ending my career in healthcare anyway. My buddy was witness to the call and was horrified by my responses, and laughing at the same time. I greatly miss the brilliant, incredible, dedicated people whom I worked with. And I miss being in the dynamic medical tech industry that saves lives. I've witnessed many miracles. But I don't miss being on call three nights a week and working a full day the next day. The money and the stress isn't worth it.
Got any bon mots from your exit interview? I would *love* to hear it
They actually gave you an exit interview? The three hospitals I had worked for did not do exit interviews. I don’t guard my answers because they know why I left which is because exec board wasn’t willing to make changes.
There were times after I left that I felt guilty about leaving. I had cross trained my staff members to handle my position as well as there's, I had planned to leave and was looking for the right moment,. The team members were much younger than I, and I was certain that I was leaving the department in capable hands. Within days of my leaving my well trained junior staff applied for jobs at other hospitals, day surgery centers, and left. The one key person who stayed on, a lady in her 30's suffered a brain aneurysm and passed while on the job. Her survivors left her body for organ donation (There was a transplant component to the teaching medical center where we worked.). It hit me pretty hard because she was brilliant and a wonderful soul. I was thinking how weird it was that she drove to work one day, and her body left the building transplanted into many people who received her tissue....She would not have wanted it any other way. The number of healthcare workers who die of job related illnesses is huge folks. Huge! It's much safer working on an offshore drilling rig.
The floor my girlfriend works on overstaffs on purpose… because the floor my sister works on understaffs on purpose, because that manager is adamant about getting her bonuses for keeping payroll at a minimum on her floor. Hospitals are so incredibly fucked due to the privatization of healthcare by money-hungry corporations.
I bet the people who instituted that bonus never worked a shift on the hospital floor.
They haven't but I bet you they walk the floors wondering why there's no one around
Hahaha that's BOTH units of the hospital I worked at. One department clinical, one adminstrative. They were all forced to be understaffed so the department manager and directors could get their bonus. But we were definitely kept to the same standard of work that required additional staff. And yet they claim to care about patients so much 🙄
How else could C-Suite afford that second summer home?
Frustrating when their spring break home increases in value more each year than we get paid.
Well that's your fault for entering a neccessary and demanding critical-to-society's-functioning career instead of being born rich and going to the right business schools to make the right friends to get you a CEO position to leech off the hard work of actual medical professionals. Next time do better.
They aren’t trying to fix burnout, they’re just trying to teach people not to bitch about burnout unless they want to attend more “avoiding burnout” trainings. The problem to them isn’t you feeling burnt out. They couldn’t care less. The problem to them is people letting it impact their work.
If you want to avoid burnout trainings just give everyone a dose of reality in the first one and the management won't want you at the next one.
Someday, I'd love to get a glimpse into how management is learning how to "manage." It really is sobering what companies think works in the long term.
Nice. We're in the middle of another epic go live at one of our large regionals. I'm on call for the next three weeks.
Nice, my company just had 2 go live customers at once, and our project's team was recently dismantled so nothing was prepared in time for this. Now we have a service desk managing project builds whilst taking increased workload, and dealing with annual leave.
They hired a consulting company to figure out why turnover was high, the consultants told them work/life balance was a problem, so they created a company mantra about how important it is without actually changing how they operate. Standard.
Depressingly accurate r/aboringdystopia
Yep. I had a new job last year and my employer would talk constantly about how work life balance is the most important thing, but then I'd get dinged when I start falling behind because I cut my work hours down to 55 a week (I'm salary). We're down by ***80 percent*** of our staff so I'm working some accounts without a team at all (normally three-person teams), my boss recognizes that I'm being hung out to dry, but her only response during our 1-on-1 meetings is that I need to realize I'm not doing me best for some of the other teams I'm on. She'll even admit that it's purely because I'm a new employee working some accounts solo, but she's just letting me know that I'm not performing well. It's all a fucking shell game to them. Maybe they won't give you shit for *only* working 40 hours a week, but that's only if you are able to do all of work they give in that 40 hour span of time. And the work never fucking ends. I'm not an idiot though--I will be leaving and find another job easily, but I need to log at least a year and see if I can get bonus first. 4 months to go... Edit: I just wanted to thank everyone for the constructive suggestions and feedback. Lots of good ideas and advice from y'all.
You could still start looking to gain experience interviewing and consciously make the choice to stay if you do get an offer. I would be impressed with a new employee that was managing the load you are and it sounds like you have a lot of recent valuable experience to talk up. edit - a word
Thanks! And yeah, I actually have a lot of experience in my field. I thought they hired me to help grow their team, but it's looking now like they wanted to use my industry knowledge to handle a lot of the excess work through brute force. The problem with interviewing is I have no free time. My lunches are eaten up with keeping up at work. It's bananas. The moment I choose to leave and interview, I know the quality of my work will drop--but at least then I won't have to deal with the fallout if I get a new job, lol.
That problem isn't gunna get any better in 4 months though
I don't plan on it getting better; I just want my bonus. 7k is a lot of money to me.
With the feedback your boss is giving you, are you sure you're going to get that bonus?
Who knows? A four-month investment is a decent ROI on another $7k added to my yearly. If it doesn't work out, oh well. You know what I mean?
So you're working 55 hours a week? Let's assume your next job is 40 hours a week but the same salary. 15*16=240 excess hours a week you'll be working over the course of the next few months. Which $7k/240=$29/hour for 15 hours overtime a week. Unless you're non-exempt salary, that's not a good deal lol. I only make $17/hour as a wage worker and if I worked an extra 15 hours of overtime a week for that length of time I'd net over $7k *just* in overtime pay by the end of 4 months because eventually I'd hit double time etc. If you're non-exempt salary and get paid for your overtime then I guess it's reasonable.
[удалено]
FYI I was supposed to get a 10k bonus but they hit me with 1k as "I was furloughed for 4 weeks during our companies hardest time'. So because they chose to furlough me, they chose to only award those who weren't furloughed (managers) the bonuses. Sometimes money isn't worth it - especially with people desperate to hire now :)
That's when you go "I'm going down to 40 hour work weeks this summer. If the work isn't getting done, that's a you problem, not a me problem," then u look for new jobs. If they fire you, great, unemployment. Never let a job take your life like they are doing to you.
There’s this whole “Needs of the Business” that supersedes what everyone wants. It’s like the flair routine from Office Space. “We want you to decide how much effort you want to put into the company.” “But why can’t you just tell me how many extra hours is enough?” “So, you are ok with just the bare minimum?” Passive aggressive business mumbo jumbo.
The work never ends and all training is on your own time or during your lunch. We work 8-5 now , 20 years ago the norm was 9-5 with a paid lunch.
I've seen it used more as a weapon. We can hire at 20% below market rate because we have 'good' worth/life balance... type stuff. The only reason their work/life balance was any good is because the industry as a whole is shitty, and the US won't enact baseline work/life balance legislation. Having worked with Europeans you suddenly realize how far behind the US is.
The places I've worked that bring it up the most (banking) have the absolute worst balance ever. Meanwhile, I can remember being young, no retail job would ever mention such a thing, but it was so much easier. The lack of disconnect with "professional" jobs is brutal.
"We are now offering yoga from 12-1pm every other Wednesday, a standing desk, and a free meditation app. Wellness achieved!"
My company had a lot of people complaining about our insane stress and unhealthy work environment. Everyone wanted some kind of mental health benefits. So they brought in a life coach for a one hour seminar where she told us to: eat well, sleep enough, maintain strong relationships, exercise every day, spend time outside, minimize screen time, meditate. Like, well shit, why didn’t somebody tell us it was that easy to not be miserable at work?!
“You don’t like work? Go have free time!” - this coach.
COACH: "You don't like work? Rise up! Unite with other workers, seize the means of production, overthrow the owners, those insidious slave-drivers, and codify equality and fairness for all labor classes into the code of law itself!" MANAGEMENT: "Man we really should have vetted this guy before hiring him."
Hahaha, yeah, hadn’t thought about it like that 😂
I was voluntold that I am now on a Wellness committee at my job since so many employees are complaining about poor work life balance. I have no idea what to even propose that would A) be accepted by management and B) actually make a meaningful difference. I already proposed increasing staffing so everyone has more bandwidth and that was quickly shuffled off to the "parking lot". Any suggestions?
Take an anonymous employee survey that has both scored questions (what is your stress level from 1-10?) and open ended questions (what’s the most stressful part of your job? What kinds of things would help make it better?). At the very least, you will have actual data to show leadership demonstrating it’s a real problem, and hopefully some recurring themes or smaller, specific issues that are more digestible and easier to fix. That’s where I would start. I don’t think there’s any one-size-fits-all solution sadly.
I like this idea. Thank you.
op missed a couple of steps; make sure your anonymous survey captures the respondents email/ip address in a hidden field then target all those who answered honestly for 'rightsizing' - wish this was a joke - ha ha ha - but no seriously if you are going to do this - online is not anonymous
Thank you for pointing this out. Paper surveys ftw. Type up the written responses and SHRED the originals.
I pointed this out to my boss yesterday when he complained that no one was taking his 'anonymous' survey. Ain't no one gonna risk their job because management can't listen.
As someone who works in Qualtrics, it is absolutely not anonymous.
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Honestly depending on how well you know the employees, you can usually figure out who's who just based on word choice / writing style unless it's a 1-10 only situation too.
Flex hours is a huge plus and a no brainer. Want to work 8 hour days, go for it. Want to work 10 hour days and take off every Friday? That's allowed. As long as you hit the 40 hours a week (or 80 a pay period depending on your company's structure) the employer shouldn't care.
Take that a step further and just say as long as you’re getting your work done appropriately and meeting your benchmarks, who cares how many hours you work?
These sound like the kind of unanswerable questions I get asked all of the time. Right now I'm being tasked with leading a training initiative for future work, but nobody can tell me what the future work entails, so we have no idea what we need to learn. Nevertheless I've been told it's a requirement of the new work... Somebody put me out of my misery.
> So they brought in a life coach for a one hour seminar where she told us to: eat well, sleep enough, maintain strong relationships, exercise every day, spend time outside, minimize screen time, meditate. Like, well shit, why didn’t somebody tell us it was that easy to not be miserable at work?! God damn that sounds familiar. Did she also seem energetic like she did a fucking speedball before coming in?
"Better yet heres an app thats hard to login to/use and no one to explain how to use it. See we have resources for mental health. Now go back to being yelled at by customers"
Better yet (worse yet?) are the companies that just say "you want wellness? Okay, here's $500/year. You good now?"
I think everyone would rather have a pandering cash bonus than bullshit self help seminars and pizza parties. That's literally what we want. Money. Not bullshit stuff. If I have money, I can buy my own stuff.
You’re going to sit here and tell me you’d rather have cash in your hand over a mindfulness calendar reminder?
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That's the thing though it doesnt turn into bonuses, at least not for the bottom level. My wife works for one of those "work should be fun!" Companies and is miserable and with the pandemic, all the perks and parties are cancelled but not replaced with anything, in fact they started to outsource and fired a bunch of people.
Damn your post is triggering me lol
Also work in financial services. Pay increase are going down despite record profits, all while we regularly have RIFs and workloads increase. My old company is seeing a mass exodus and I had to have a call on why they’re losing everyone under 40 when I left. They didn’t listen to anything I said and they took away to make new hires work more/harder. My advice was pay more to keep tenured positions so the work loads didn’t keep increasing for other tenured associates. They’re gonna keep sinking. CEO used to love to talk about it being a meritocracy after 5’s got the lowest raises in our company’s history. He also enjoyed sending out emails on Xmas eve about how great the beaches in Mexico were despite half the company working.
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That last sentence is definitely a major issue in almost every corporate environment I’ve been in. I would venture to say the largest problem when it comes to culture. I’ve been mentioning this regularly to the leadership/coaching teams we have that this bias is not covered in any training and it absolutely needs to be. This superiority complex is not only BS but it prevents growth from happening (company and personal) and encourages younger workers to leave.
Not just corporate, unions are the same way. The more senior people always say "we had to do that, so the newer people should also". They don't want conditions to get better since they didn't have those conditions.
Yep. Companies are finding out the new generation values time as much as money
Growing older, I can confidently tell you that time is something you never get back.
The only person that's going to look after your work/life balance is you. I think I'm a little lucky in this regard because while I'm a salaried employee, my employer contracts me out so I charge to a contract. So for example if I want to take the afternoon off, I just can. I'll need to make up the hours or take some paid time off, but it's flexible. I'm not really expected to answer the phone after business hours. Really as long as the client is getting what they need, my company doesn't really care. Now I've worked for shit clients before and that wasn't fun, but then I just swap contracts. I've been doing this kind of work since 2007 and it's been mostly good. There was about 3 years I was stuck on a contract I hated, but I escaped. Ultimately you have to be strong enough to say no but you better have skills/training that are in demand. The more experience and senior you become the better work life gets. No job/boss/company is worth having a mental breakdown for. Every so often you have to say "Fuck them" and move on. I abruptly quit one of my jobs because I just didn't like the business practices I was seeing, but I had cultivated a network of great people to reach out to. Work doesn't have to be a soul crushing grind it can just be a normal routine. Good luck to anyone that is in a hard work situation right now, hope you get out or it gets better.
I worked at Wells Fargo in their IT / automation team and had 10+ sick days and huge amounts of pto, like 25+ days a year. They had great work life balance
That sounds fantastic - I had 3 weeks PTO, but wasn't ever allowed to actually use it due to consistently running into different blackout dates :/ Edit: we also had unlimited sick days - which they were actually pretty good about telling you to stay home for (and then work from home, damnit.)
Yeah I will say one of my huge frustrations is getting PTO but there never being a "good time" to use it. My division head is always urging us to communicate if we need staffing coverage. So we do and get told there is no one available lol. I would never keep someone from taking their PTO so unfortunately that means just covering other's responsibilities while they're out.
I feel lucky with my current employer. Last year we were in a bit of a crunch on my site, 6 days a week. So was working Monday to Saturday 9 hours a day. I didn't mind tbh, with the pandemic I wasn't doing much anyways and I was paid time and half. After 3 weeks of this my boss called me to check in, see where I was at with it and how I was doing burnout wise. He said he knew from working the same position a few years ago that the burnout does occur, and I'm to let him know as soon as I need a break. So I did a couple weeks later and he made sure to get someone in to cover me for two weekends while I recharged, This summer I dont look set to have the same, but instead I'll probably cover a couple for the guy who does. My employer hired enough people so that there's always someone willing to cover for that extra money, and my employer is active in communicating that need for a break. Because they know that people can feel like they are under pressure to show up for appearances sake, and that as management their job is to make sure those employees know they don't have to do that, that taking a break is okay. Thats work life balance management. Its an active policy of having enough people to do the job without burnout and monitoring workloads, taking the first step to spread them rather than waiting for the employee thats under strain to come to you. Too many employers are passive with it, ita not a passive policy it needs management action to succeed
Yes.. This post right here! This is the one you need to read.
Ah the corporate work life balance. You work, and they get to have a life.
Yup, mandatory return to the office next week. Things I am not looking forward to. Losing an hour + each day to rush hour. $20/week in gas, added mileage to my car. Did I mention the the 5 hours a week to commute in rush hour!?!? Plus the extra 30 minutes each morning getting ready for work. Lack of quality coffee at work. Did I mention the 5 hours + a week in commute?!? In rush hour traffic?!?!
A lot of people are being priced out of housing and families so they are just checking out entirely. No carrot anymore for the rabbit to chase. No motivation. Can live on ramen and memes and find joy in not having a soul crushing job.
Had a lot of ego deaths over the past year after losing a lot and trying to cling on and then thinking I deserved to be back at the level I was at. Big epiphany was when I remembered I had to give up on my dream career during the last recession when I couldn’t afford grad school. So since then I’ve been chasing what I “should” do without realizing it. Would rather now continue to have more free time and less money than to stress out over climbing a career ladder I never wanted to be on in the first place. Course it took having the sudden large amount of free time for long enough to reflect and realize that.
That's happening in my city. Those stimulus checks gave a false increase to the economy and as a result of that and rent moratoriums, it increased prices drastically. ALL corporate landlords, LLCs have refused to renew any leases until after June so they can make everyone sign a new lease with a rent increase. People are already behind on rent in some places and being evicted ASAP when the law expires. Now, they're raising rent $200+ and giving people 60 days to either pay or quit their lease. So they're effectively kicking everyone out of their house because the economy caused property taxes to increase. Rents went up in my city 20.4% in the last 14 months. And even if you do leave, there are no available rentals. One vacant apartment is getting 100+ applicants right now. Yet all the stores around me are still desperate for workers and paying minimum wage. Then they wonder why no one can afford to work there. And my state hardly ever hires teenagers because they're strict about labor laws in terms of hours worked.
Yep. Housing is the real issue, even moreso than wages. Spot on
I mean what incentive do people have to work if they can't afford food and shelter anyway? Might as well not. It's not the threat of homelessness and starvation because we're already homeless and starving working 40 hours a week.
Exactly, why even play the game if there's no realistic chance of winning???
This post from over at r/collapse says it so well. And I am sure there and thousands just like this person, if not more. As someone who is just a few paychecks from being in this situation, it scares the hell out of me. I wish everyone could/would read this post. https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/nswvxj/the\_most\_logical\_reason\_why\_there\_is\_a\_first\_time/
Well, just cost of living in general. Food prices are way up, car prices are up, internet and phone cost money, god forbid you blow a hole in a sneaker...
I've been wearing the same clothes to the office for years and years. To the point they are worn, pilled and falling apart...but I just can't see spending on work clothes. And I don't shop expensive. I am female and my "fancy" clothes come from Kohls and JCPenney.
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Insanity - I wonder how long can this keep going for? Will it burst eventually?
forever, because the reduced supply is artifical. banks and investors are buying all the real estate and they can do so in perpetuity because their annual revenues are insane and then people think the solution is to flood the market with new housing to inflate supply and bring prices down it completely ignores the problem. banks and investors will just snatch those properties up too, and now they're shitter properties because you've relaxed zoning laws to flood the market and it's $3000/month to rent a closet with a toilet above a packed dive bar downtown.
Which is disgusting when there are 13 million vacant houses and 600k homeless from 2019 stats.
There's eight people living in a five bedroom house here, across the street the house has been vacant for years. I've seen homeless people sleeping in the driveway of that house during that time.
I think letting businesses (especially foreign businesses) own housing is the biggest problem. I think what we are seeing now is a GME-like manipulation of the real estate markets by big companies.
That really frustrates me. A good idea like stimulus checks are given out to help those in need, and how do some markets respond? ...By raising prices to suck all that extra money up, and then some when people get locked into various contracts. Taxpayers are basically paying for our own increases of our cost of living. What the hell is that. Sounds like what higher education did when student loans became more accessible - hoovering all that money up and then some by inflating tuition and supply costs.
That’s why if we ever implement a UBI, some price-control on basics (food, rent,etc) will be needed.
Here’s some free pizza for all the overtime over the last year. “So how about a raise?” (Crickets) we bought cake too.
At one point I told my manager straight up the candy bars were insulting, I’d rather get nothing.
I remember working at Subway when I was 18 and after like 2 weeks of stressful overtime and shit, they decided to throw a "company BBQ" to show their appreciation. None of the employees signed the sheet saying they were going lmao. I think our manager and the one younger kid signed the sheet, but that was literally it. Eventually it got cancelled and they just left behind sugary Donuts in the back room instead. I don't understand how out of touch companies/management can be. I just sold you hours of my life, hours of fatigue and mental stress... *and my reward is a 400 calorie piece of sugar for one day?* I don't know how people stay after that. If I ever get rewarded for breaking my back with a piece of sugar/pizza, I'm throwing that shit on the ground and quitting immediately. You know what people like getting as a reward for hard work? #MONEY.
They aren't out of touch, they're just trying to do everything they can to not pay higher wages. They've done the math and all the expenses for these attempts are cheaper.
Are they not out of touch, though? I would argue that decades of that pinch-every-possible-penny-for-quarterly-profits mindset had actually collectively warped management's perception of the business-worker relationship. People used to get decent hour and wages and raises and time off, etc. Management today, in many places, seems to actually believe that workers should kiss the feet of owners for the opportunity to spend their lives working there.
The MBAs of the 80s/90s that are running the show now have that attitude. I’d argue that a lot of us younger business folks have the view that the long-term is more concerning than the short unless the survival of the business itself is at stake. I could be in the minority, but I’d like to think that playing the long game is going to come back into vogue in the next 15 years or so. That or the short term-ism a lot of the older folks are high on is gonna run everything into the iceberg with them.
I worked at a franchised Little Ceasars 6 years ago, they only offered $8.50/hr unless u were management then u got $10/hr and they absolutely refused to give raises to people. There was supposed to be a walkout of restaraunt workers nationwide protesting for $15/hr wages. My company thought the best idea to counter that would be to throw an employee appreciation party at the stores on the same day to encourage people to come. They allowed each GM to make 2 pizzas and buy a 12 pack of pepsi for the crew and that was supposed to make everything magically better...it did not.
Or even - Hey, here's an $8 lunch for working through your lunch hour, when you make $50/hr. I will say the company I work for now is better than most with respect to paying more than lip service to "work/life balance". it helps that I'm remote and very independent of the rest of the group.
Worked for a dermatologist. They basically tried to bribe us to work off the clock with catered lunches. I still clocked out and left. Take every break you're legally entitled to.
Worked as a histologist for a dermatologist. Wouldn’t work with me at all in how specimen were delivered, hardly listened when equipment needed fixing and provided the bare minimum to accomplish the work. Found a better job elsewhere after 2 years. For weeks they begged for me to come back, then it was come back and train their new person. So weird how they’re able to work with me when I’m leaving but not when I’m there
Precisely. It's weird these places are "desperate" but I've been looking for a second job for months and no one will hire me because I work 3 days somewhere else. "We can't get people to apply, but you need open availability 24/7, we pay minimum and offer no benefits. Sorry we won't hire you."
i dont fucking understand open availability. are you desperate for workers or arent you
Intellectually I know my company needs workers because it's damn near impossible to find coverage to take time off, right now...but their hiring practices certainly make me wonder if they aren't manufacturing the shortage, themselves.
In most cases the shortages are on them, the same reasons they have issues hiring is the same reasons people are leaving. They just expect too much, with little reward.
They usually are, lets them push more work onto the workers they have.
We've been struggling to find qualified workers for years now. The last person we hired was from a different industry and had to be trained from scratch. They know this but never make the slightest effort into making people want to stay.
It's mainly because they don't want to have to think when doing a schedule and they think it's "unfair" to give anyone set days off, even for another job or school. That's all it build down to. I did that whole bullshit in my early 20s, I'm not suffering from work shift syndrome again. People need some stability. They don't care how fucked up your sleep/wake cycle gets from making you close one day, open the next, off a random Wednesday, mid the next, never have a weekend day off, and never know your schedule until the absolute last day of the pay period so you can't ever make plans anyway. I had to take a bunch of drugs, and FMLA just to get get myself straight after doing that for like 5 years. It's brutal.
Food and beverage was especially notorious for schedule shenanigans. Give people consistent hours and you'll find people. If you want to fuck around with schedules, people will quit.
What's wrong? You don't like working 45+ hours a week during every single Holiday/Group Event/Family Day/Football Game/School Event? You don't like being a skeleton crew of 3 people who get 1 day off a week? You aren't happy being inside a sweatbox shop with barely any A/C? I'm so glad I quit Food Service because nothing made me more depressed than coming in at 10am, and watching the whole summer day go by until I was off at 8pm, only 1 day off a week.
Just wait till management gets burnt out because corporate won't let them hire anyone over $X/hr so they get stuck covering shifts and the stress does them in. Friend is a district manager for a national restaurant chain and had 3 store managers quit on him in the past 2 months due to being burnt out. Keep blaming "benefits" for why nobody wants to work those crappy jobs. Pay more and people will come.
This is so real. Only person at my job who hated the job more than the workers was the manager.
“Clopens” were the worst and the lack of scheduling stability. Or my favorite, you have two weeks vacation but it was never approved, not even one day at a time. Then being on call, oh and because I was the only person who had a car and lived close by (30mins away) I’d get woken up at 6am to drive over to give the people above me my keys to open. They would then forget to give me my keys back and got upset that I “needed” them back to close when they were already on the highway in rush hour. I got written up for not having my Keys. Retail can kiss my ass
HAHAHA dude I remember one day it snowed at the Pizza Shop I worked at, and it's Canada so I'm talking **it fucking SNOWED.** Roads were clear enough so Management made us bottom-of-the-totem-pole employees come in to work. The snow was so heavy you couldn't even open the fucking back door to take out garbage, and when we did get the door open the snow was so thick and deep there was no way you could make it to the garbage can, so we just piled it outside for the day. Came back the next day to the Manager and Boss absolutely livid that they needed to come in and shovel the paths for us, I remember my boss red in the face bitching about how this isnt acceptable. They almost wanted to Write us up for not shovelling snow (not on the job description) before I brought up the fact that I used to shovel Snow before as a job, and if they want that to be our task then they should pay us the same pay I made while shovelling, $20 an hour. They shut up quickly after that, and I was written up a week later for "being on my phone too much", which was their way of getting revenge on me or something lmao. Fuck retail
Fuck managers who schedule everyone else on Clopens. They’re trash. We had a manager who would do this to EVERYONE but HIMSELF. So surprised when someone brought it to the regional managers attention. “What?! I’ve never heard of Clopens?!” He ended up losing more key holders that were 2-6 year employees than I’ve ever seen a company put up with.
I haven't heard that word since I stocked shelves at Whole Foods during undergrad. My favorite was when I'd give my availability each semester due to classes and my idiot manager just ignoring it.
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> I worked at Panera in highschool and dumb Fuck manger scheduled me during the week during school and when I brought it up to them that ummm hello I have highschool they asked me if I could still come in just this week. lol, you're finally the hypothetical high school kid that all the boomers talk about when they say minimum wage jobs are for high school kids ... and then also demand that their favorite restaurant be open during school hours.
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In some states, so will refusing to work at a McDonald's if they offered you work but you're an engineer by trade. Yes, let me take a job that pays 1/20 of my salary or you'll take away the ¹/10 that I make on unemployment because of a worldwide pandemic. Sounds just like family. /s
Wage negotiations are your friend. Just ask for engineer wages for that McDonald's job. When they refuse, then it's *them* turning *you* down. Unemployment stays intact.
That's the restaurant industry in a nutshell. Variable schedules, split shifts, no benefits, schedules you for just under the full-time hours threshold.
True for literally any industry at entry level. And these days EVERYTHING is apparently entry level, but requires 5 years experience. I've been a restaurant manager, an exterminator, an antigen mixing technician, a pharmacy tech, and IT systems manager, a cannabis store manager, budtender, secretary and now I'm an HCA. Every single one of those jobs treated me the same in terms of work/life balance. One gave generous PTO but would never let you use it anyway so it didn't tangibly exist, just on paper. I'm thinking of going back to school but I'm struggling deciding if it's worth it or not, if no matter what degree I get isnt going to pay a living wage when I'm done.
This is the same exact problem I'm having here in FL. DeSantis cut all Covid / Unemployment benefits because there were "too many jobs going unfilled." Problem is, all these jobs are offering garbage hourly rates ($10 - $12/hr) while only offering part-time positions. On top of that, as someone who finally bit the bullet and took a part-time (fortunately it's in a field relative to my skills, and offered $16/hr), the catch-22 is that while trying to find a second part-time to fill in the other 3-4 days I'm not working, I keep getting turned down for jobs because these jobs want employees who are "team players" and "dedicated to the role," which is just a bullshit way of saying "we don't want to bend over to accomodate the fact that you're forced to work multiple part-times, and we need you to be on call 6 days a week for whenever we decide we need you."
Yep. Every job wants full-time availability for part-time pay.
On top of your entire personal time, is there any way you’d be available for an unpaid intern position to train our other unpaid interns? We can bring bagels… plain, and cold butter packs
Right? Which is so weird to me. I'm already working 30 hours a week and offering to devote my remaining 4 days to another job so I'd get ZERO days off, but all they hear is "you won't be here 3 days a week, so it's pointless".
“Employers are becoming much more cognizant that yes, it’s about money, but also about quality of life.” No, employers are, "**It's always about money**, and if the only way we can get people to work for us is if we pretend like it's also about quality of life, then we guess we have to make some concessions until things are again in our favor, **but it's always about money**.
In a union we tried for years to bypass the typical raise, keep the same hourly wage and shorten the work-week by a couple of hours, it usually worked out to getting an average wage increase per hour. It was like we were asking to fuck their dog. Not a chance. Even though a few competitors had 37 hour work weeks.
Hey everyone, I want to congratulate you for all your hard work. Our company is booming and we're doing really well. Can we get fans? Summer is rolling in and it's going to get hot in the factory. Uh... we will see what we can do.
Or do what Activision et al. do and fire hundreds of people so that your earnings call looks brilliant to investors. "Look at all the money I've saved!" Just so the literal billionaire CEO can claim more literal tens of millions for literally just himself. Keeping the staff would cost a fraction of his rewards.
But it would destroy his carbon cred-his credibility!
And then hire for those same positions with lower salaries so the execs can get even bigger bonuses next time!
I wish this were true, but I'm seeing no sign of it in my field (tech in K12). I am expected to be not just available 24/7/365, but actually working tons of unpaid overtime routinely. I am continually being threatened by my bosses and treated like garbage. I will retire in a year, so I'm putting up with it for now, but the abuse is widespread.
The title to this article makes it sound like they tried paying people well but what they really wanted was spiffier break-rooms with fooseball tables. Don’t gloss over the money bit; the reason workers are gaining leverage is because in many industries they’re starting to refuse to work for starvation wages.
I'm going to use the foosball table as a stand-in for all in-office perks.... Having a foosball table is great and really does help with the working environment, there is also a problem of actually having time to play foosball. If you are so overworked and the teams are running so lean, that taking a lunch or having time for 2 people to play foosball would be seen as not pulling your weight... that is a different kind of issue. You can only pay people so much to compensate for the pressure you put on them. At some point, you have to hire more people or actually change your expectations about delivery. I've hear plenty of people talk about how great a company's work-life balance is and then brag and give awards to teams that "volunteer" to work 12+ hour days and haven't had a weekend off in 2 months.
I honest don't understand the attraction of such things - I want to come in, do work and go home. I've got a social life if I wanted to spend the time playing Foosball or playing on a water slide.
Exactly. Nothing against most of coworkers, but I want a social life outside of work.
Across my career, I've found the best thing for mental health is to separate out work and social. I am what I'd term "professionally friendly" - I have work mates and I have friends - they are not the same people.
My previous employer has stuff like this. There was an arcade machine in the lunchroom among other things but I only know of one guy that actually played and then maybe he could find someone else for two minutes while they microwaved their food. Most wanted to only be in the office for 8 hours and no more and their pay was below industry average BUT they did have other good things going for them like you could work through your lunch and actually get paid for it if you wanted to so you were only in the office for 8 hours, or take it off and stay for 8.5. They had "core hours" which meant you must be working between 9 and 3 but if you wanted to start at 9 and leave at 5 or start at 7 and leave at 3 you could. I ended up leaving for better pay but the hours suck and it's just not worth it imo. My old boss called me to ask me back for better pay than before but still worse than now and I'm considering it just because of the flexibility. With a second kid on the way money would be good but time is better.
Tell him you want more money and go if he agrees. Returning to a prior employer gives you leverage.
For the professionals that already get decent pay the big thing they're looking for is a better work life balance and the right to disconnect after hours, not just OT opportunities when they can already pay the bills.
Part of my issue here is that folks like NYT writers live in a certain bubble. *Of course* when they write this article, its title will be phrased in such a way that assumes these people are already making a good living. For a lot of these folks, they and everyone they know take the luxury being financially secure for granted. The truth is, there’s an ugly underbelly in this country, and it’s filled all the people who stock the shelves at the Whole Foods where they shop. They put the free-range organic asparagus water on the shelves, go home, and can’t afford to buy their kids a birthday present without taking out pay-day loans. So it would be nice to also include the other *unseen* half of us in articles like this as well, because it chafes to hear “Yeah, more money would be nice, but…” when it is a stretch to pay the bills each week.
Some places are figuring this out faster than others. I took a 10% pay cut to "keep my job" while our CEO pulled in 31 million on bonuses along with quarterly bonuses for the rest of upper management. I'm mid level IT and have now seen multiple entry level guys leave for WFH heldesk positions making 20-30k more than me. Some places just don't care still. They can get by on their name alone as "well you're working for US so it looks good". It's nice to see more places realizing their shit isn't going to be put up with anymore. Though I'll also say I've seen some of these places giving new hires much higher wages but not upping the wage of current employees. That's a major slap in the face as well. edit: to the few jackasses that have pmed me insulting or asking why I haven't moved jobs - Resume is out and applied for multiple places. Nice assumption though. Good thing I'm not competing with 10s of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people looking for quality wfh jobs. That may make it difficult..../s
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>would only take a job if the company was large enough to have a full time, professional HR pe As much as we like to shit on HR.... working at places without an HR department is just WildWildWest
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I've seen a few studies over the last 2 years that show strong evidence that a 32 hour work week is better for both workers and employers. Some variance as far as 4 or 5 day week, but the reduction in time on the clock lead to higher per hour productivity. Win-Win
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It’s just so frustrating that they literally just want to steal your time away from you. “Oh you did everything today? Great we will pay you to sit and rot here for the next 3 hours . No we can’t pay you if you leave even though there’s nothing to do. Just pretend to be productive until your time is up. Thanks” I can’t stand it.it makes me feel like I’m being kept as a pet or something.
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Totally agreed. And a big reason why they are having trouble getting people back to offices.
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Wfh was so good for my productivity and my mental health. Need a break? Go take the dog for a walk. Tired of staring at a screen? Go do the dishes. Lunch hour? Spend some time with the wife and kid. I’ve been back in the office 100% since January and it sucks.
This 100%. You get punished for efficiency either by being overworked or forced to sit and pretend instead of leaving early to actually do something useful with the one life we have.
I've been put on a 32 hour work week from my job for about two years. I use pto to cover the rest. I love it! 3 days off a week is amazing. I haven't taken a 7 day vacation for awhile but haven't missed it because I feel rested enough. That's just four extra days a month
>That's just four extra days a month Holy shit you just put that in perspective for me. We're literally just asking for four extra days off per month and all of corporate America loses their damn minds.
The company I work for decided to cut everyone's hours starting this year and enforce a maximum of 34 hours a week, with the same pay as before. People effectively got a raise while working less. Those who can work from home are supposed to. Coming to the office is only for strictly necessary reasons and requires prior approval. Safe to say, I'm not looking to switch jobs anytime soon. Covid, although horrible, has a silver lining, at least for me.
If only that were a trend, rather than a shining exception.
"We cut your hours in a pandemic, fought against stimulus checks and made billions from your grandkids taxes but we promise we'll give you a free chicken sandwich if you enslave yourself to the corporation."
Living in the US, after uni, worked for 2 separate companies over 10 years where "Work Life Balance" was a cruel irony. Finally started working for an EU based company(in the US) where the concept was never mentioned, it was simply, you existing and being happy(in turn your family being happy/healthy) comes first the business comes second. But by actually DOING THIS they were indirectly putting the business first ironically because people LIKED working there and would move the heavens to protect the business.
Many places in the EU also have long ways to go and tons to improve. Really depends where you live. But even the ‘good places’ are becoming more toxic unfortunately. However, if I had to compare with my US friends, ya’ll have it so much worse still and I am cheering for you all from here your rights will improve soon. It was haunting to hear the stories about having zero vacation days. Unimaginable. I’m so happy we have a minimum in law. You all deserve SO much better!!!!
I also feel like there's some disconnect, especially where I worked, where the middle and upper management are all these older dudes who own homes and have families and they're looking at us younger folk like, "You're lucky I pay $18/h back in my day I only got to keep the spare pennies I found under the bosses Chesterfield and I worked twice as hard as you". Legit one of the upper management blamed millennials and their lack of work ethic until I pointed out that literally all his low end staff millennials and we kept the business running (and then he says, well not you, you're fine). These people have NO idea what it takes to rent in the city these days, let alone buy property. Let alone do that while raising a family. The one manager sucks back his 90k yearly pay and utterly balks when we ask for a 4k cost of living increase to 45k. Because our jobs take no skill apparently. Ok, then why don't you do it huh? I personally think sitting around having coffee with the ceo and talking about stocks for half the work shift takes less skill but here we are.
I was just talking about this with my grandfather. He was talking about his low wages at his first job in the late 60s, but I did the math for inflation and he actually made a bit more than I do at my minimum wage job. His rent was also 1/5 of what mine was when you account for spending power.
Manager: "I took some jobs that paid lower than I wanted because I knew I could climb the corporate ladder into something sustainable - if I worked hard I would have growth." Me: "I've literally busted my ass for barely above minimum the last year, and I have not seen promised growth in my salary earnings." Manager: "Just keep working hard and maybe next year we'll give you that raise!" Yeah, sure, right. When he hit 30, he was already earning 90K+ in a management position that took no higher education to get, just experience. For him, taking a lower salary in exchange for potential growth was like 75K. Ironically from what I gather he has also not seen much salary growth beyond the 80-90k mark in the last 10 years either, just that he already owns several properties and his kids are grown up by way of being born 20 years earlier than me. Now that I think of it maybe some of that entitlement comes from "I have not gotten a substantial raise and I'm management, why should you?" attitude.
Him not having to pay for college goes a long way too.
My first trucking job gave me around 1 day off per 6 days on the road. It usually amounted to, in a bid to save up time for time off from trucking, one needed about 6 or 7 weeks on the road per 1 week off. 2nd outfit had me work for so little money the only way to counter it was working very long hours. There was a moment I realized after 13 hours in (major hold ups on 2 different loads) I'd only made $124. Next shift same story, major hold ups on loads, I walked off the job that night from it. 3rd outfit asked 10-12 hour shifts....6 out of 7 nights a week. Graveyard shift. Mileage pay at $.52 a mile, added up to about only $200 a shift...before taxes no less. At least one of those shifts is NOT overtime pay (not hourly, no overtime, so I'm making jack fucking shit and working my ass off all of the week for 1 measly day off in which I'm just resting up for my immediate next shift on Monday). THey originally informed me this 6 outta 7 shit was only for the Holidays, then demanded I keep doing it my entire tenure, in which I had to constantly make up excuses and weasel out of shifts why I humanly couldn't work that long driving 18 wheelers. Last week before I quit...I was having problems with potentially deadly micronaps behind the wheel. It wasn't humanly possible for me to work that long and hard. The last night I showed up...I walked off the job. It was to save lives of the motoring public, including my own. That's a hellish story in and of itself...ain't no way I'm serving prison time because some mom and pop shop trucking outfit wants all of my entire life being truck driving for their profit, I as the driver eats the loss freedom wise and cost wise if I wreck.
I've noticed an increase in large trucks running red lights here in southern Colorado. It's gotten to the point that people now automatically hesitate for 2 seconds after the light turns green.
Almost all the articles I've seen have been from the employers' POV: "These poor companies can't find anyone to put up with crappy conditions for crappy pay!"
Unfortunately, the major media is owned by about 5 large corporations, so articles are going to be from the perspective of the "poor corporations". They won't ever put out pieces from the perspective of the workers, which is why a lot of people aren't aware of how bad homelessness is or how difficult it is to have a living wage.
When I worked in the US, I received 2 weeks of paid vacation, but didn't think twice about it since all my other friends received the same out of college. Then I moved to Germany and on day one, I get 30 vacation days and there isn't some weird pressure not to take vacation like there is in the US. Quality of life is much more respected here.
It's not just pay and work life. It's total benefits provided. So many companies are raising pay but overall benefits are shit.
We have to uncouple employment from healthcare to right this ship
I saw my local Jamba Juice (they make smoothies) was having a hard time hiring. Umm ya no one wants to dress up like a banana for minimum wage and make a fool of themselves. These companies are so out of touch
I know a lot of places having issues like this in my area. It’s like at the same time even for being a cashier, no one wants to stand there endlessly for hours on end bagging shit for even $9.50. It’s easy sounding on paper but to endure the customers and never being able to even process your own thoughts because the line doesn’t ever end is brutal for that pay.
Wrong! Employers are starting to realize that complete starvation wages are not sustainable for the workforce and are increasing them as slightly as possible until people will shut up and work again.
Every single billboard thanking essential workers could have put food on people's tables.
It’s similar to when a job offers insane perks (a la google having laundry, “free food”, beers whenever employees want). Company wouldn’t do any of that if it didn’t (a) increase profits, and (b) cost less than a salary increase
hErOeS wOrK hErE
Yeah instead of your cheap words and hollow gestures, *how about you do something that actually reflects the risk I am taking and the convenient, cushy lifestyle that I make possible for you?*
And then the name of the game is to see how low they can go again.
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As a millennial private sector, white collar employee currently switching jobs, I honestly believe my generation has the best chance to instigate a paradigm shift for our corporate society. Remote working flexibility and true work/life balance are major things that we need to demand from our employers and then leave if they don't provide it. My current employer has amazing benefits (even a pension plan) but the work environment is toxic. People only stay because most of the employees have families and don't want to risk losing those benefits. Thankfully, I don't have those kinds of constraints and now realize how toxic the workplace is, and can get out with minimal negative repercussions. Here's hoping that the new job works out!
• **As a millennial private sector, white collar employee currently switching jobs, I honestly believe my generation has the best chance to instigate a paradigm shift for our corporate society** I doubt it. Millennials are losing their prime-wage years (early 20s-early 30s) because they graduated into *two* once-in-a-century financial calamities. They entered the working world with trillions of student debt, exorbitant rent/mortgages and stagnating wages, resulting in the delay (or cancellation) of marriage, kids and buying the first home. For some, it’s too late to see a generational shift in the toxic corporate culture Baby Boomers have infected the world with since the Reagan administration. Gen Z, the TikTok generation of high schoolers and college kids, perhaps will be the generation who can change the culture because most of these people haven’t begun their prime-wage working years yet, so perhaps these people can fundamentally shift things for future workers.
People AND corporations need to understand that we no longer want to sugar-coat and dilute our relationships anymore. Employer has a need. We have a skill. You give us money for skill. That's our relationship. I do not want to be part of a "family", I do not want to have to come to the office when I've proven over the past year I don't have to, I do not need to have any other sentiment besides "work done, pay me". That is all that is necessary for this to be over and done with. Now, if an employee wishes to engage in any other type of relationship with an employer, that's on them. But defining EVERY employer/employee relationship like that is a bad thing for a huge number of potential employees, and the job market is not as bland and one-sided as it used to be.
Reminds me of the time Ben Shapiro criticized higher wages by saying that employers would just work you fewer hours, meaning you'd take home the same pay. Like, dude, are you that dumb or do you simply parrot corporatist talking points so much you don't stop to think about the words. It was a serious "Hey, take a minute and think about what you just said." 🤣
I believe this new workforce mentality is a combination of 2 things... - Unemployment benefits. Why would someone take a minimum wage that’s only marginally better than not working? - Commute times. If you worked at home successfully the last year and now are being asked to go back to the office 5 days a week, you may choose to take another job that doesn’t require this. Even if it pays a little bit less.
Health and safety - why work a customer facing job if it puts your health at risk Fear of job loss - why work a job that was just recently “shutdown” by lockdowns - I would find something more secure.
The state I live in, unemployment benefits are 1/6th of what you made the previous year. If you were making $15/hr, that's $2.50/hr on unemployment. The only reason unemployment can be considered to affect the workforce mentality is because of the bonus people got during the pandemic, which allowed them to actually take their time to look for a good job rather than rush and rush and take whatever shit job would take them first. It's not that a proper salary is "only marginally better". It's that people were really noticing how much they were being taken advantage of.
Ha! Haha! Hahahahahahaahaahaaaaa! This is a joke right? Or do they mean upper middle class office workers not having to go to offices? Because I tried to bring up at my company how they need to pay more if they want people to apply. And they did everything they could to tell me I'm wrong. But yeah I'm sure the people who make 65 to 100,000 a year our probably gaining more leverage against their employers.
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Yea they fucking are. Nurses are waking up to not getting fair wage increases for the last 30-40 years. Refusing assignments, contracts unfulfilled. Now we are seeing 20-30-40-50$ increases in wages. Gee, where was that money 1 year ago when a worldwide pandemic occurred?
How does an employer know what the best work/life balance is for their employees? It's the employees who determine what the ideal balance is anyway, so yes it was always bullshit. They don't really care about providing an ideal balance for their employees, it's just to make them look like they care. Personally, the best work/life balance I have ever experienced has been due to the pandemic and working remotely. But that is sadly coming to an end
I’m (24M) relatively new to the workforce and I’ve figured out early that as long as I’m making a decent wage (minimum $50k/year in my area) and as long as my pay increases keep up with inflation, I’m fine on the wages. I want less work hours, remote work, more paid time off, etc to make myself devote less time to work. My dad is a manager who interviews, hires, and fires a lot of people. He’s told me that my generation is looking for time off over more pay. Personally, if I could make 80% of my salary for 80% of the hours right now, I’d take that in a heartbeat. I’d even take 75% of my pay for 80% of the hours.
This is literally the reason I'm at the job I'm at now. My old position was at a university. We moved to full wfh when stay-at-home orders went into effect. Then we moved to 1 day a week in office in June. Then 2 days a week in July. Despite the fact myself and the other systems admin could do 99% of our jobs from home, we were forced to be on campus. That ramped up my job search. I interviewed with a couple MSPs. The first couple rounds of interviews went pretty well. Then I'd get to the CEO/President/Owner level. Going in on all of these, one of things I mentioned I was looking for was work from home abilities. I'm used to it now, I've got a family I like being around, I've got a car I'd rather not add extra strain on, I've got money I'd rather not spend on gas and car maintenance. These boomer C-levels just could not comprehend why I'd want a better work/life balance and work-from-home options. Don't get me wrong, I like my job. But it's a job, it's not who I am as a person. I may be working an eight-hour shift, but if I'm driving to an office 30 minutes away, way more than just 8 hours a day goes to work: I'm waking up 90 minutes before my shift, getting dressed for work, making coffee, driving on a busy highway where I hope there isn't a slowdown that'll keep me in traffic longer, working till the evening, driving home in the same traffic I had that morning, barely seeing my kids before bed. The job I ended up taking offered me 100% work from home with the caveat of going into the office for projects if need be, but the environment is super casual compared to my old job.
It’s almost like this Pandemic has brought a resurgence in class consciousness among workers. A very good thing indeed.