Some thoughts on surviving those workplaces that will never win an award.
Plenty of places are weird places to work.
And there are millions of workplaces (in the United States, it's 8.4 million, according to recent U.S. Census Bureau data). There are a lot of awards out there but certainly not 8 million: not every workplace will win an award.
But here's to those who are trying to keep it together - who are doing there best to make pockets of calm or sanity.
And: much of the weirdness you're heroically enduring is diagnosable. It has a name (and it can change).
It often happens in a group text. The one with a handful of people you actually trust — the colleagues who are safe. Someone sends a message after the all-hands. Or after a meeting that left everyone smiling and saying nothing. Or after another announcement that contradicted the last one.
The messages aren't angry, exactly. They're more often funny.
Or they're like: did that just happen? Or: I can't keep doing this. Or just: 🙃
If you've been in a workplace like that, you know exactly what I mean. You've probably been the one to start the thread.
I think about those group texts a lot. Not as evidence of dysfunction (though they can be) but as evidence of something else:
People who still care enough to process what's happening. Who haven't given up on making sense of the place where they spend most of their waking hours. Who are, often, working incredibly hard to do good work inside a system that isn't making it easy.
The managers trying to run honest, functional teams inside organizations where honesty isn't especially rewarded. The HR and communications leaders drafting messages they'd rewrite completely if they could. The people absorbing the dissonance between what leadership says and what employees experience, and staying anyway for reasons that are usually more complicated than "I need the paycheck."
These are workplaces that likely aren't going to win any awards. But you are doing incredibly important work, trying to make them better.
A low-trust workplace doesn't usually look like chaos from the outside. It often looks fine. The values are on the wall. The careers page is polished. The leadership team speaks fluently about culture.
What employees experience is different. How decisions, feedback, questions are handled, explained, or glossed over. What gets stuck and what gets accelerated and why it all doesn't seem to make much sense.
It is the hundred small moments, distributed across every level of the organization, that employees are always reading to determine what is actually true.
It is hard to work in that gap. It's hard to be the person trying to hold things together inside a structure that wasn't designed to support that effort. It doesn't always look like burnout from the outside. It can look like high performance. The people doing it are often the most committed, most capable people in the organization, which is exactly why they're still there, still trying, still absorbing what the system produces.
What I want to say to those people is: what you're experiencing is real, and it has a name: a design problem. Not in the people, not in the physical space (though that might be a visible manifestation). In the actual architecture of how the organization makes decisions, communicates, handles difficulty, and treats the people doing the work.
This matters beyond the individual experience. The managers building small pockets of trust in low-trust organizations are doing something genuinely important for the people around them. And it may pay off in whatever future version of the organization it might eventually be... if there are leaders willing to do the harder work. That work shouldn't be invisible; I applaud it.
For the leaders reading this who recognize something here: the distance between a low-trust workplace and a high-trust one is rarely about resources or intention. It's usually about whether leadership is willing to look honestly at the distance between what the organization says and what people experience — and then change something because of what they see.
If you're the one in the group text right now: we see you. Keep going. We're cheering you on.
Need to make the case for why this matters? Trying to figure out where to start?
At Employera, we work with organizations at every stage of this journey — including the ones still in the struggle. If you're trying to make the case for why this deserves serious attention, or just trying to figure out where to start: we might be able to help, so let's chat.