When work is coercive, managers have the power to ruin lives
There’s something we’ve been politely ignoring at work.
In the United States, healthcare is tied to employment. Either directly, through employer-sponsored benefits, or indirectly, through wages used to purchase healthcare through other means. For workers who have families, a job can mean the difference between not only their own health, but that of a spouse or children.
Wages are how we pay for our homes, even as homes grow less and less affordable. Again, for those who have families, the stakes go higher than just personal wellbeing.
There are further examples of employers defining our lives. Consider how things grow more complicated for those who live under work-sponsored immigration arrangements.
In a multitude of ways, in far too many cases, managers hold their employees’ lives in their hands.
This is a considerable amount of power for someone to wield. Yet, too often, people are given this leverage over the lives of others with no training, limited oversight, and zero recourse when things go wrong. It’s easy to say that it shouldn’t work this way. But it’s not possible to change our economic systems overnight.
Until everyone can exist safely without the blessing of an employer, employers of conscience have a duty to be proactive about their obligations to workers.
Exploring the duties of employers and managers
It’s startling to consider that more effort goes into proving you can drive a car than goes into establishing you are competent and self-aware enough to take responsibility for the economic realities of others. Yet, battlefield promotions into management are the norm in so many companies.
Training and coaching
Just like driving, managing other people isn’t something you’re born knowing how to do. Management is a set of talents that require conscious development and ongoing coaching. You can’t just set someone loose with a handful of people’s lives and hope for the best.
Managers need to learn processes for interacting with and developing individual teammates, and for directing the team as a whole. Managers need to develop communication skills, since miscommunication so easily breeds team dysfunction and interpersonal rifts.
Managers also need to be coached. It’s easy to let ego and reactivity creep into your decisions. Without an outside point of view to catch mistakes and watch blindspots, managers are all alone in a difficult job. It’s their teams who pay the price.
Worker advocacy and a process for grievances
Power is stacked against workers in the average job. What happens when things go wrong? What happens when human error is multiplied by hierarchical power?
What happens when someone behaves badly?
Worse, still, what happens when that someone is a manager?
Right now, most companies let these problems metastasize until they explode into the press or devolve into lawsuits. But it doesn’t need to work like that.
Imagine if companies employed people to act as advocates for workers in trouble. In the spirit of a public editor or ombudsman, a workers’ advocate would be paid by the company to hold that company to high standard, and to protect workers who got caught in the gears of malfunctioning workplace politics. They could be much cheaper arbiters of workplace disputes, and given enough latitude and policy influence, they could even make their organizations work better.
Currently, this role is hamfistedly typically played by HR, which is perceived to protect the interests of the company over those of workers.
Soft landings when things don’t work out
Sometimes, even the healthiest teams and teammates don’t quite mesh, and someone has to leave. Sometimes the best-intended companies don’t make their financial ambitions a reality.
When something like this happens, it’s unconscionable to summarily terminate workers. But too often, that’s exactly what happens. And it’s cruel: whether it affects just that worker or their whole family, an income shock like the loss of a paycheck can send people reeling.
A company that’s serious about its duties to workers must budget to ensure it can be good to them even when they part company. For roles that include healthcare benefits, severance has to include a few months of paid insurance.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg
Of course, you don’t have to do any of these things.
But if they sound like too much trouble, I’m not sure you can be trusted with the responsibility of the health and livelihood of your workers and their families.
This is a tiny sample of the things you have to do if you want to do right by the people who make your business possible. The potential list is endless and varies according to your products and industry. History will look back in horror that so many people had such control over the lives and happiness of others. Its horror will deepen at how few of those people actually took stock of the full reach of their power.
Be on the right side of history. Acknowledge what power you have in the lives of others. Take steps to act responsibly.
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