Anxiety in the workplace

Hot tip: Don't!

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A decade ago or so, when I was not doing very well, I decided to opt out of the yearly performance review cycle. I announced this wild plan during a presentation I gave on work-life balance, aptly called “Life of a Burnout”.  When I announced my plan, an audible sigh of surprise went through the audience. I just saw them think: “Wait, what! You can opt out of perf?"

I latched on to their surprise and said: "Sure you can. Here’s how that works: I am not going to write a self-review and I am going to tell my peers not to write me a peer review because I am not going to read it. Also, I won't write any peer reviews, unless it is for promotion purposes."

"But what will happen?", someone asked.
"I don't know", I responded, "but I will probably not get fired for not writing a self review…"

When the time came to have the performance conversation with my manager, I told him that I thought I deserved a “meets expectations”. He agreed with me and then did his duty by imploring me to support the system because I was a role model yada yada yada. I did not get fired…

After the aforementioned talk, a few younger colleagues came to me and told me it was so refreshing to hear someone say something so ... different. Apparently, from the moment they had started, everyone had been stressing to them how important the performance review cycle was, how to write a good self-review, how to select the right peers, how the system worked, when the various deadlines were for the phases of the process, and whatnot. All that attention to this process drove an enormous amount of anxiety because, to the uninitiated, it looked like this was a recurring make-or-break career event.

In a previous article I mentioned that I used to facilitate one-day workshops on work-life balance issues called "Managing Your Energy". I wrote that I would start the day with the following sentence: "The course material here tells you that in order to have a good work-life balance and feel energized you need to eat healthy food, work out regularly, sleep eight hours a night, work eight hours a day, work on one thing at a time, be happy, avoid, or at least deal well with, negative emotions, and work on things that you agree with (philosophically). Is there anyone here who is surprised by that?"

Nobody ever was.

I would then have a conversation with the group about the primary problem of our time: The knowing-doing gap. Why is it that we know what to do, but are just not doing it? This is of course a complex and multifaceted question, but when having these discussions, I did see some trends.

First there was the almost ubiquitous imposter syndrome. Modern tech companies have done an excellent job spreading the message that they hire only the very best and that you should consider yourself very lucky to work there. It is definitely true that these companies used to do a good job hiring the very best, but you really didn't, and still don’t, have to be a Nobel-prize winning rocket scientist to work there. That said, at these companies you are typically surrounded by very competent people, quite a few of whom seem to operate with the sort of effortless confidence that I associate with coming from a very privileged background.

More than enough reasons I’d say to feel like an imposter…

A lot of people were impressed that they were hired by the company (I know I was) and so obviously they felt a lot of pressure to fit in and succeed. That was made harder by the fact that both the company’s internal processes and our technology stack were very different from everyone and everywhere else.

Demands were high and consequently many people feared that they were a hiring mistake.

Q: What do you do if you think that you are one?
A: You compensate by working harder (works somewhat) and worrying a lot (does not work at all).

Working harder showed itself in regularly working a lot more than eight hours a day, working evenings, and working weekends. The company enabled that by giving us every gadget known to man and every type of access that would allow us to work whenever and wherever. So a lot of people would wake up and immediately check their work email, many would take their first call on their way into the office, and lots of people would check email and finish work items late in the evening, often right up to the time they went to bed.

Hint: This does not do wonders for the quality of your sleep.

Doing this achieves three things:

1. It wrecks your work-life balance (bad).
2. It impacts your mental health (very bad).
3. It raises the bar for everyone else (suboptimal).

The first thing is obvious and probably doesn't need a lot of explanation. Many of my colleagues said they would love to exercise or sleep more, if only they could find the time! The second thing is a really big problem and deserves an entire article dedicated to it, but let’s summarize that for now by noting that stress changes your personality and can lead to pessimism, depression, and (from personal experience) lasting changes to your mental makeup. 

The third item is where things are really going off the rails though, because by working harder, the anxious people who are worried about their performance, raise the bar for everyone else. Pretty soon you are considered a slacker if you are not on that email thread that got started at 9 pm or are not attending late meetings.

One of my former colleagues at Meta still tells everyone that the most impressive thing he thought I did there was go home every night at 5pm :-)

Many of the attendants to my work-life balance courses said that the reason they were checking email and chat all the time was out of fear that there was something important happening and they did not respond whereas their team members did, and what would their manager think of that?

Personally I think it is awesome if there is something important happening and other people are attending to it, because that means that I can do something else that is also important but maybe not as noticable.

This leads to crazy behavior. I regularly got (and get) emails from people who write things like: "I will be off next week to bring my kid to college in Hawaii, but I will be available on chat and I will check email twice a day." Are these people batshit crazy or what? THEY ARE BRINGING THEIR KID TO COLLEGE! It is a once-in-a-lifetime event that is a watershed moment in their kid's life and that will never ever come back! And it’s Hawaii! Get your priorities straight!

As my dear old father used to say: The cemetery is full of people who were indispensable.

To help lower the bar, I do the opposite: Whenever I go on a bit of an extended vacation (a week or more), I create an out-of-office message that says something like: "Hi, I am on vacation until mm/dd/yyyy. While away, I will not read email and not check chat. Furthermore, when I get back I will archive all of my unread emails. If you really, really, need to get a hold of me, you are smart enough to know what to do."

That approach never failed me and nobody ever told me it was unacceptable. It also got me quite a few laughs, some applause, but only a very small number of followers, because even though people love the approach, they don't dare follow it.

The “Winner takes most” world we created also created a feeling in the “winners” that they are very fortunate to have this job at this company and that they have a lot to lose. People fear that if they would get fired, their life would suck: Less money, less prestige, and fewer career opportunities. Basically they fear that they would die soon, single, lonely, and poor. I don’t think this is true at all, but that fear does create a lot of anxiety and hence leads to bad work life balance and negative impact to mental health.

Remember: When asked on their deathbed what they think they should have done differently, people rarely say: “All things considered, I think I should have worked more…”

Let these insights be your guide…