Is Your Work Toxic?
Let’s confront a beast that we celebrate all too often. A beast that leads to exhaustion. A beast that leads to burnout. A beast that forces employees and entrepreneurs into doing way too much to reach success at work.
Today let’s confront Hustle Culture aka toxic work in Six Ways to Discern Toxic Work.
What is Hustle Culture?
Dante: Before we get started, let’s define what hustle culture is.
Lola: I read this really cool article by Christine Lorelie on Medium – Hustle Culture: Why is Everyone Working Too Hard? She defined hustle culture in a way that I could visualize on so many levels.
Hustle Culture defined by Christine Lorelie:
Hustle culture (aka “Burnout Culture,” “Workaholism,” or “Toxic Productivity”) is all about constantly working. Those who hustle attempt to devote as many hours as possible to work.
Outwardly, hustle culture seems like a high-energy-motivational movement that comes with expected rewards. For most people, working long hours is typically associated with moving up the corporate ladder faster, making six-figures in the shortest amount of time possible, or earning passive income due to around-the-clock hard work.
It is the belief that you can succeed and achieve anything you want in life if you work hard enough. But this can only happen if you devote 1000% of yourself to work, lose sleep, and self-motivate yourself to push through the pains despite all forces that work against you.
Christina Lorelie/Medium
Dante: Now, Lola, I want to make sure, did you say a thousand percent?
Lola: Sure did. That’s what Christine Lorelie stated, you devote yourself 1,000% to work.
Dante: That’s a no, that’s a definite no. A thousand percent to work? I like to sleep. I need other things to do. I need to rest and relax.
Workplace Stress
Lola: That can’t be true for everybody because we looked up some statistics, and people in our economy are getting stressed out at work. They’re getting stressed out. They’re getting burned out.
Dante: Here’s a quote from a Harvard Business Review article, it cites the APA, which is the American Psychological Association. It says,
‘Workplace stress is estimated to cost the U.S. economy more than $500 billion dollars, and, each year, 550 million work days are lost due to stress on the job. Another study by the APA claims that burned-out employees are 2.6 times as likely to be actively seeking a different job, 63% more likely to take a sick day, and 23% more likely to visit the emergency room.’
Jennifer Moss/Harvard Business Review
Lola: So it’s obvious that people are subscribing to hustle culture.
Dante: Exactly. It’s not like hustle culture is new either. In that same HBR article, it says the term burnout was introduced in the 1970s. Even though we’re calling the hustle culture now, it probably had another name.
Lola: Right. It probably existed from the time that people could work, achieve success and compete with their peers and neighbors. To be honest with you, toxic work is totally against nature and the way your body works.
The idea of go hard or go home. Team no sleep. All work, no play. Sleep is the cousin of death.
All these sayings are not natural. It’s not normal, and we should not try to normalize it.
Culture Tries to Redefine Everything
Lola: I think something we do in our world today is we try to redefine everything. We try to normalize everything. But some things are NOT normal for a reason. Because if we were to normalize them, it would be chaotic to our world and our society, such as hustle culture.
Hustle Culture is Not Normal
Lola: Hustle Culture is not normal. Hustle culture encourages and normalizes tired, exhausted workers. And let me add — what we just read.
According to a claim from the APA, burned-out employees are 2.6 times as likely to be actively seeking a different job, 63% more likely to take a sick day, and 23% more likely to visit their emergency room. This means that they’re calling out of work. They’re calling out maybe because they’re sick in their bodies physically, or maybe because they’re sick in their minds mentally and emotionally. Whatever the case may be, when you’re stressed out, your body is more susceptible to illnesses.
All of which is just showing us that hustle culture is not okay.
Dante: Exactly.
Lola: It’s not anything that we can sustain for long periods of time. In the future, I think companies will have self-care days. They’ll have mental wellness days. I think it will be allotted like sick days or vacation time. It will be normal.
Dante: I completely agree. With everything that’s happened recently and just the effects of the pandemic itself, people will prioritize their health and mental health more. Companies are just learning that we need to make sure that our employees are as healthy as possible. And mentally healthy employees are happier employees, and happier employees are better workers — aka more productive, engaged, and creative.
Lola: Before the pandemic, some people limited social media time for mental health reasons. Because what mostly showed up on their feeds were highlights and reels of great things in other people’s lives. For some people, that’s depressing. Then with sitting at home for a year, gaining the quarantine 15 (weight), it’s amplifying our triggers and problem areas. Am I making sense?
Dante: You make total sense.
Competitive Company Culture
Some jobs promote that toxic work and hustle culture.
Lola: I think that our readers probably feel like I’m feeling right now: the weight of hustle culture and how real it is.
Some people work so hard because they genuinely fear losing their jobs.
Dante: For me, I subscribed to the hustle culture at one time. I actually felt tired. Angry. I did not like going to work because I felt stressed to be there. Stressed to perform. Stressed to make something happen until eventually, I said I can’t do it anymore. I need to go at my own pace. I can’t be focused on work 1000 % of the time.
Lola: Let me ask you a question. The work that you had that made you feel like, I got to adopt this hustle culture thing, what type of work was it? Was it–
Dante: Commissions.
Lola: Sales?
Dante: Sales.
Lola: Okay. Got it.
Dante: It was a job where literally my entire paycheck was based on commission.
Lola: Oh, yes. Nobody has time for that.
Here’s something else I read on HBR:
According to the foremost expert on burnout, Christina Maslach, social psychologist and professor emerita of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, we are attacking the problem from the wrong angle. She is one of three people responsible for the gold standard of measuring burnout — the eponymous Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) — and the coauthor of the Areas of Worklife Survey. Maslach worries about the new WHO classification in the IDC11. “Categorizing burnout as a disease was an attempt by the WHO to provide definitions for what is wrong with people, instead of what is wrong with companies,” she explains. “When we just look at the person, what that means is, ‘Hey we’ve got to treat that person.’ ‘You can’t work here because you’re the problem.’ ‘We have to get rid of that person.’ Then, it becomes that person’s problem, not the responsibility of the organization that employs them.”
Jennifer Moss/Harvard Business Review
Lola: When I read that, it made me think that’s a great statement, and it leads to a great question: Am I the toxic one, or is my work just toxic?
Toxic Sales Jobs
Like Sales, it has that commission culture. You have to make your sales, or you could lose your job. It’s not even just you might not get paid. If you’re not meeting the performance metrics, eventually, you gotta go home.
Toxic Corporate Work
Corporate work is another environment where hustle culture is high because we’re pushed to be very, very competitive. We don’t necessarily look at our teammates and peers as people to collaborate with — we look at them as our competition, like, ‘I want to bite your head off and get you out of here because you might take the job I want.’
Toxic Entrepreneurs, Bosses, CEOs
Toxic work is high for entrepreneurs too and people that are CEOs. They get hooked to hitting those big success marks like, ‘Okay. I had a $10,000 week. I had a six-figure week. I had a $1 million year. I had a $1 million-plus month. I want to keep reaching these numbers.’ They subscribe to it too.
Anyone in a performance-driven environment is subject to toxic work and hustle culture. So pretty much, nobody is safe.
The Smoking Prophet
Is Your Job Promoting Hustle Culture – Or Are You The Problem?
So let’s get into the main topic: Six Ways to Discern Toxic Work.
You can use these no matter what type of work you do. Use it to figure out if your work is toxic and who’s the culprit. Is it the company culture, the business culture, or is it you?
1. You dread work.
Dante: You want to leave your job. Maybe it’s the people around you, or you have challenging relationships with your managers. Maybe you don’t feel supported enough at work.
Maybe you’re experiencing peer bullying (yes, this happens to adults) or some other type of unfair treatment—unreasonable demands (like you must reply to emails in 15 minutes or less).
What about inconsistent communication. No communication.
Or not having the right tools to do your best work?
Maybe you can’t get promoted.
Whatever it is, your morale is low, and you dread going. That’s toxic.
The Fix. Get support at work or outside of work. Voice your concerns to whoever you report to directly—unless the conflict involves them. Handle workplace conflicts carefully. You can always get guidance from HR, internal employee counseling services, or an outside source. Please make sure whoever you choose is credible, competent, and has expertise with your issue.
2. You don’t have an end of the workday routine.
We mean routine as in something you do 80% of the time. Don’t play yourself. If you do it once a week, it’s not a routine.
Lola: Over the past day, how did your workday end? Did you stop working without any clear boundary saying your workday is over? Did you end your day moving from your office at home to the sofa with your laptop in tow? Think about it. Did you leave the office only to come home and do more work? How did you end your day?
Did you end your day by locking your computer? Locking your computer (vs. shutting it down) is a very telling sign of toxic work. Shutting down your computer says I’m done. Locking your computer sometimes says: something unfinished is still on my mind. You cannot completely shut down from work, and that’s toxic.
The Fix. Check out my end of the workday routine in How I Do A Team’s Work As One Person. Use it to create a clear end of the workday routine or ritual that suits your work and lifestyle!
3. You’re not making enough money.
Dante: As an employee, you’re NOT earning enough money to support your daily living or the future. It’s not the living wage. As a business owner or entrepreneur, you’re NOT in the black—meaning you are NOT breaking even on your costs. Your business is costing you more money than you make.
The Fix. Companies know how much they will pay you before you apply, interview and even accept a job. Your tenure doesn’t matter. Your education doesn’t matter. Your experience doesn’t matter. Companies have budgets, and your salary will always align with their budget. You cannot change this. But you can find other ways to make money outside your job or in another position. You especially need to increase your income if you don’t make the living wage in your region.
4. You don’t have a retirement plan.
Lola: As an employee, business owner, or entrepreneur, you must prioritize your retirement fund. Not doing so is toxic.
And you’re not in the clear just because you have a retirement plan.
It’s also toxic to NOT check on your plan to make sure your regular contributions are on target for retirement.
Sunset is going to happen for everybody. When I say sunset, I mean a winter season. A time when things slow down, and you’re just not able to produce in the same way you were in your prime.
The Fix. It’s essential to have a retirement plan that gets regular contributions. To stay on target with your retirement—see what your company offers and if they’ll match your contributions. Also, reach out to an investment company or financial advisor for a more personalized approach to your retirement plan — including investing your existing 401K the way you want.
5. Your work doesn’t fit your future.
Toxic work doesn’t fit or lead you to the future you want.
Lola: Dante turned down a few job opportunities because they did not fit his career path, aka his future.
Dante: I really wanted to focus on technology, so I turned down many opportunities until I got one in tech. I was not going to settle for something that I didn’t think would fit me later. I didn’t want to be in a place or a position that I would not like. I wanted to go somewhere that suited my future.
Lola: And when you have a job, you have the luxury of applying for and choosing positions that fit your future. Now it’s different if you’re out of the workforce and you’re looking for something. Then you may have to take one for the team. Aka—get a decent job to stay ahead, stay afloat, and pay your bills.
The Fix. Find one that does. When you look for work, make sure that the job will benefit you now and fall in line with the person you plan to be in the future. You want to be in a role that gets you energized when you wake up and makes you feel fulfilled when you go to sleep. But what else do you want? Whatever it is, go after that.
Tap to listen to podcast episode #49 ten practical ways to get your dream job.
6. The job doesn’t fit the future.
Toxic work is work that doesn’t exist in the future. This happens when your career path is on a fast or slow decline. If this happens to you, focus on what skills and competencies you’re experience afforded you (aka transferrable skills). Then look for jobs that want those skills and competencies.
The Fix. Think about how present markets are evolving. Then consider what future markets will need. What industries are growing? Which jobs are declining? What programs are the most competitive schools offering? Check the Occupational Outlook Handbook — it gives specific info like the fastest-growing US occupations, the pay, experience needed, and educational requirements.
Lack of Peace is NOT an Indicator of Toxic Work
A lack of peace or stress is not necessarily a key indicator that your work is toxic. Some jobs and environments are more demanding. And you get paid to take on the stress. So a lack of peace and stress does not automatically mean your work is toxic. It does mean something is happening. But that something could reveal one of your triggers or a skill you need to master so you can better manage the stress.
DANTE + LOLA
Dante is a money magnet and the king of optimization. He loves creating plans that cut losses, increase profits, and build cash.
Lola is a genius at creating digital content and OCD about organization. Her gift is making things simple and organizing creative projects.
Got questions? Contact us!
Featured Photo by Retha Ferguson on Pexels
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