Amy Heidbreder

I was reading through comments on a Facebook post that had gone viral. The post was written by a husband who included on it a photo of his wife in labor. She sat waiting out contractions in a hospital room, preparing to give birth to their child. In the photo she was upright in a bed, but not engrossed in the task of having a baby. She was instead on her phone, in the process of communicating to her boss via text that she would be unable to make it to work that day due to the circumstance. Per the husband’s description she was reading and rereading, overthinking the text before sending it. It was apparent she felt guilty for calling out. The post reflected on how painfully American this is. Commenters chimed in, leading the charge in vilifying the American work environment and blaming horrible bosses.

While I agree there are a plethora of toxic work environments out there, and I agree that horrible bosses wielding control complexes and egos the size of Texas absolutely do exist, I don’t believe the problem lies primarily with those set on abusing their power and mistreating staff. They’re not the majority. The average boss doesn’t usually set out to purposefully make a pregnant woman feel bad for having her baby that day.

Bosses are just people with lives and families, but they are the escalation point, and if their team is not there that morning, they are the ones expected to uproot their plans and show up. That can become just as toxic as any abusive work environment, especially on teams that are small. If week in and week out a manager is having to work well over 40, 50, 60, 80 hours per week, they’re taking time away from their kids, their health, their family, and no pay is worth that.

If we can’t blame our bosses for hating our jobs, then who shall we blame? It’s easy to see we have a problem, when a woman feels guilty simply for giving birth. No one should feel guilt for taking time off no matter what the circumstance, but we’ve created of the average American work environment, a culture that is hostile to time off, and subsequently hostile toward living. It’s no surprise that this era is being quantified as “the great resignation.” People want better.

To solve this problem, we all need to walk ourselves to the nearest mirror and look at it. Culture doesn’t change by firing a few abusive bosses. Culture changes when a majority acts. These problems start with us and the culture we’ve ignited with our consuming habits and our affinity for speed. A famous pastor recently likened it to microwave culture. I feel like that is such a great analogy. We’ve become a culture of convenience, instant gratification and temporariness. We’d rather throw away than clean. We design in seasons. Cycles demand a new release every year. And what happens to last season’s product or something unwanted? Sometimes it just gets thrown away. We have a cycle of work that is literally winding up in garbage cans by the end of a season. I stumbled upon this Instagram account that puts in perspective what is wasted by businesses in New York. I intend to write a whole blog on waste one day, but in the meantime, check out this Instagram account:

This disposable work culture is not healthy. It’s a waste of resources, fuel, time and it’s hurting the environment. Additionally, increased demands for perpetual change are burning out the work force.

The fickle nature of social media adds complexity to this culture. Many consumers have no grace in their body anymore. Upset at the slightest inconvenience, these types of consumers are the first to launch a colorful rant on social media, putting a lack of perfection on blast for all who care to see. Not being perfect puts companies and workers at risk of being vilified and going viral for a mistake, even something like not being there to open a coffee shop that morning because the staff member with the key is having a baby that day. Karen will make sure the world knows she didn’t get her coffee that morning. Leadership will see Karen’s rant or realize they made no money that morning, and straight to the manager they will go to interrogate. The pressure a manager feels at taking questions from leadership might indeed rub off on staff, hence why someone might feel guilt for calling out even if they’re having a baby that day.

So, what is the key take away here? Is it that the problem is us taking responsibility for our own guilt, that we must force ourselves not to care about our bosses when we need time off? Not exactly.

The digital world is both a blessing and a curse. The viral nature of social media can allow for rapid growth, but it can be dangerous. Where I find it most dangerous is in the field of development. Digital workloads cannot be visualized in real space. It may take as many or more hours to build a site like Amazon as it does to build a few down town sky scrapers in Houston, but it’s hard for the average person to comprehend that. Website building and blogging platforms that allow someone to build their own web presence quick give people the illusion that web is magic. They have no idea that the platforms they build on took thousands and thousands of hours to develop. The warehouse fulfilling individual orders, where a staff member is on his feet for a full ten-hour shift scanning and separating product for shipping every single day is invisible to us. Average people may not truly understand the manpower it takes to keep these websites running. Consumers gravitate to the ease of clicking buttons on a computer, not realizing they separated what used to be a single trip to the tack store into three orders delivered by three different trucks with three times as much packaging wrapped around them. In the same way, we may not understand the manpower it takes to open a business every morning, that all these places are just run by people, not machines, and that even machines crash when overloaded, break down when parts wear out, or die.

Could we as consumers exercise more grace? Could we as consumers not demand a new iphone every year? Do you really need that 7^th horse? Could we as consumers take a little extra time to make sure something we don’t want, but that someone else might, doesn’t end up in a landfill? Could we as consumers slow down this pace a little so that a woman can freakin’ have her baby?

Companies only demand this pace from their staff because consumers demand this pace of companies. To fix this culture, we need to fix us and our consuming habits. Fixing the problem starts with us.