Exploitation in the workplace, or at least perceptions of it, takes many forms.
If the headline of this post speaks to you, you’re not alone.
I’m not trying to encourage feelings of grievance or discontent, but these days when I talk with employees about their experience of work, the unfortunate reality is their descriptions often brim with frustration, dissatisfaction, and, for lack of a better term, a plain old sense of being taken advantage of.
Exploitation in the workplace, or at least perceptions of such, takes many forms.
I recently came across a survey from Paychex examining these issues, and many of the employee pain points that surfaced coincided with my observations. Following are a few of the survey’s highlights (or, perhaps more accurately, lowlights):
- 83 percent of respondents felt they were doing tasks outside their normal job position.
- 57 percent believed they were asked to do extra tasks because they were the “expert” or “best.”
- 46 percent admitted they took on “everything that’s asked” because they “couldn’t say no.”
My simplified distillation of the situation: There are many beleaguered people out there. It often boils down to a familiar “big three” of employee anomie: gnawing feelings of being overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated.
The religion of “more with less.”
In the last decade or so of my career in corporate management (I retired from the corporate world in 2012), a new management mantra started to emerge that has become commonplace: the need to do more with less.
Doing more with less. On the face of it, this just sounds like good efficient management. What is competent management paid to do, after all? And no doubt about it, companies sometimes get fat, get in trouble, and need to tighten their organizational belts and do more with less to compete effectively. Fair enough. I’m an MBA; I had the training, and I get it.
On the other hand, you can’t belt-tighten forever; a steady diet of this tough leathery stuff can have negative implications for those under pressure to do the actual work–that is to say, the many lads and lasses trying to keep their heads above water by operating at maximum efficiency with minimum people and resources.
This is a tough hill to constantly climb.
I fear we’ve evolved into what Robert Reich has called “a harsh form of capitalism”—highly focused on profits, stock price, and shareholder value, and often very good at achieving these metrics, but not so good at taking care of the actual humans creating all this value.
This is why a manager who “gets it,” who treats employees thoughtfully and well in an organization known to be an excellent employer, invariably engenders long-term loyalty.
It is always better for human capital to feel highly valued than taken advantage of.