My workplace recently started doing a “Path to the Weekend” initiative. This is a mandatory meeting held at 5pm on a Friday for an hour about every month, where we have to have extroverted style discussions such as “tell us about 2 new things you accomplished in your personal life since the last meeting.”.
It’s hell.
Time to start seeing just how “mandatory” they’re talking.
That or I would just have one stock answer every week. “I like to keep my personal life out of your fucking meetings.”
And then you get branded “the combative one” and get laid off first when they consider layoffs
I’ve been the pain I in the ass who was kept on until I quit for a better job, and I’ve also been the overly available, underpaid, overtime worker who got laid off.
Upper management is totally blind to which employees are valuable. Now I’m just myself. I focus on career, my skills, networking, and keep an eye on the job postings every now and then.
The director of my department just announced a new initiative starting this year for something similar.
Once a month, we now have a two hour meeting where we need to prep and present a five slide PowerPoint to our peers. The slides are focused on project status, work accomplishments, personal development, a life update, and mandatory feedback given to one of our peers in front of the group.
So not only am I forced to share details of my private life to a bunch of people that I hate in a fucking PowerPoint, I have to single someone out with one thing they’re doing well and one thing they can improve.
Single out the director and tell them they can improve by scrapping the meeting. Do this every month until they listen.
I’ve seriously considered this option for sure. These type of meetings at large companies really highlight how you’re just a number. You don’t expect it from your direct manager who should at least attempt to form a relationship with their direct reports naturally.
I spend about 10 hours a week on things like this and others where I’m supposed to constantly remind the company of my value. It’s all about bragging about your accomplishments and putting it in front of leadership. 25% of my time and 50% of my mental/emotional energy. I feel like my actual work suffers because of it.
That sounds awful. My job thankfully knows I’m a privacy nut and they respect that. They don’t need to know what I do in my me time and when they think they do I explain the concept of linux so I don’t have to explain the concept of being heavily involved in my local bdsm community.
You should totally explain the concept of being heavily involved in your local bdsm community. I bet it’s the last time they ask for anything.
We used to hold an unofficial after hours on Fridays, not mandatory, where we’d shoot the shit, sometimes about work, sometimes about outside work. It was mostly to decompress after the week with a drink or two. It was effective at bringing everyone together but it only worked because it was optional and a relaxed environment. Mandatory fun doesn’t work.
Beatings will continue until morale improves
My boss bought me pizza once! It wasn’t as good as the pizzas I used to buy myself, but who can afford non-work-pizza anymore?
I think work-pizza is making my teeth hurt, but my ex-dentist is all like “tell your job to pay me.”
Hey, do any of y’all wake up crying, too? My boss says it’s allergies in my home; my boss is so nice, they’ll even let me stay at work extra-long so I don’t have to deal with my home-allergies and they only need me to do extra work without telling anyone in exchange!
Anyway, I don’t love work-pizza, but it’s better than waking up crying!
Whoops! Another tooth fell out… I bet the new ones are gonna look beautiful when they grow back in like my boss said they will.
either because they hadn’t been offered them or because they didn’t take their company up on the offer
Are they talking about the “Get fired for depression” button on the company website that no one presses because entering in all your personal info is the oppsite of anonymous?
Ha. One time I started getting burned out at a job that was not what I expected and then got depressed, which made things even worse for me at work. Had never dealt with depression for and didn’t recognize it. But I figured it out before too long and entered treatment. Went to my boss and said hey I know my performance hasnt been as great as we hoped, turns out I’ve been depressed and I’m now getting help, already feeling better. Told them, I’m going to take a couple weeks of the (many weeks) of vacation time I had just to try and refresh a bit. The week before I left one of the bosses asked to review an assignment and then proceeded to give me like five rounds of extensive notes and markup. She had never done so before and in fact had the opposite problem, of not giving enough feedback. Well, obviously I didn’t have time to finish the assignment before I left because she had me changing things and then changing them back and then changing them again. I left the next day as scheduled and got on a plane. The day I returned to the office they fired me for not finishing the assignment, one month to the day I told them I was starting treating.
Especially if your company operates their wellness programs through a third-party (as they should), you are protected by HIPAA and numerous other regulations. You should make use of the mental health resources available or you are throwing away money or your own mental health due to paranoia. I use my company’s EAP all the time for counseling (autism, depression, anxiety, etc) and participate in the other wellness BS for the small cash rewards I get for doing so. I have not had an issue for well over half a decade, because the company would get maaaajorly sued for prying, and is actually incapable of doing so because these services are 3rd party.
In my experience these things are always a box-checking exercise to justify some useless person’s job. As others are pointing out, participation can backfire because now the bosses know you have personal problems. (Everyone has personal problems, but formal admission will be punished in our toxic work-always-comes-first culture.)
It’s a shame, because such programs administered in good faith could truly help people. But helping workers is never the real objective. It’s only for the optics. “Look, we did a thing to address this”.
Ok but also just like pay for me to have therapy and/or let me go spend time with people I actually like. I don’t really want wellness initiatives, I’d take more care of myself if I had more time to
Those are the wellness initiatives at my work. Taking vacation and stepping away is encouraged, so is using your sick time to go to the doctor. I’ve never taken part in the third party therapy stuff, but it’s offered and free to employees & their families
But I realize that isn’t the norm.
I like (most of) the people I work with, and my boss is pleasant, sane, and reasonable. That does more than any bullshit “well-being initiative” ever could.
They know. But that sort of work environment takes planning, good leadership, and broader company values than just short-term profit. So it’s far easier and cheaper to throw you the occasional pizza party, company T-shirt, and 10% off mental health services.
