Down to business
Why companies need to walk the talk on employees bringing their "whole self" to work
The back-to-work call isn’t “adding joy”. Absence, in this case, did not make hearts grow fonder
Many conversations are happening about “back to work” (aka BTW) after Covid-19’s interruption and the “work-from-home” (aka WFH) of the past two years. Employees learned what worked and what didn’t, micro-managers struggled to evaluate productivity over the interweb (as my mom calls it), and CEOs served shareholders “pivots” or “reframed” the old version, buffed to a Mr Min shine.
The tensions are real — leaders want to justify high rentals for high-rises and workers can’t seem to vibe with the 60-minute commute, rising petrol prices, and angry yellow-line-busting taxi drivers. Working from home, they learned to recite asanas in their proper Sanskrit names and to “Namaste” that one colleague overly eager to drive team-bonding by forcing all to “turn on cameras”. Grhhhh.
The skills, intellect, and experiences that exit the organisation when the childfree feel unseen and/or are repro-shamed* are crucial to the efforts of any commercial enterprise to prosper. It also flies against the efforts of BBBEE (you know this one).
Now, more than ever, our country needs all shoulders to the wheel to kick our economy back to life. Maybe not full throttle yet, but at least the heartbeat can register on an ECG machine. A luta continua...
*A term I’ve coined: the childfree are repro-shamed based on their reproductive choices and negatively stereotyped as defective, selfish, shallow, and unfulfilled.