Psychological injury and management

This morning The Guardian website had an exclusive: 

“Claims for psychological injury at work surge in NSW at triple the rate of physical harm”   https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/may/22/psychological-injury-claims-safework-nsw-rise-mental-health-statistics   “Exclusive: SafeWork NSW promises to crack down on big businesses who fail to protect the wellbeing of staff”     

I will be including that in my weekly news post, but I wish to point out that a significant amount (NOT all: some work is inherently dangerous / stressful, such as emergency services, and customer abuse is also a major problem) is likely an outcome of imperfect management. 

Now, when I type that, most people probably jumped to conclusions about excessive workload, and attributed that to the desire for more profit - and that would be applicable to many situations, although customer’s desire for lower prices used to also be an issue (corporate profit is now more significant, and has transmuted the desire for lower prices in to a struggle to survive). 

In fact, that (workload and other internal management issues) is the issue being addressed in NSW, as described in the article. 

However, there is another issue here: 

the amathiac assumption that it is acceptable to assume everyone else is the same as oneself

That manifests as things such as assuming:   everyone is OK with holidays in summer;   everyone is OK with travel;    everyone is motivated by the same things (which generally means financial targets - and that is a particularly egregiously amathiac failure of management),   everyone is an aggressive alpha male personality who enjoys and wants to strut on a stage in front of others,   etc. 

To put another perspective on this with another example:   neurodivergent people are, to quite an extent, disabled because the world is rigid and unyielding in its neurotypist expectation that people will be neurotypical. 

If the world was NOT neurotypist, many (not all - some have higher support needs [e.g., daily self care] that will always be an issue) neurodivergent people would NOT be disabled - or, at least, not as disabled.

Here’s another example. 

In the 1980s, one company I worked allowed a Chinese worker to keep working through the Christmas and New Year holidays, and take that time as TOIL during Chinese New year. 

It was simple but worked brilliantly ... until someone got their nose out of joint over the difference, and stopped it until it was bureaucratically managed into being a non-functional nightmare. 

Now that ninny who couldn’t handle difference could have been a spiteful co-worker, or could have been a flunkey in mid or lower levels of management, but the response SHOULD have been: 

“This is different, but it is fair and doing no harm. Accept it, or leave.”

Until we have the overwhelming majority of management who are capable of being truly comfortable with such minor differences, and who are setting an example of that and insisting others also learn that, we will continue to have problems such as     misogyny/sexism/“glass ceilings”/gender pay gaps/mansplaining,     racism/white supremacism,     ableism,     other forms of bigotry,     inflexibility that stops adaptation to change,     less-than-what-is-possible productivity & creativity (some people are better at ideas, others at details, others at finishing - and those skills may well vary over time),     the need for a series of fought over laws with wording refined to manage every attempt to weasel out of the spirit of those laws,     and     ...   psychological injury in workplaces. 

 

Managers: learn to be competent human beings, which means being comfortable with emotions, the humanity of your staff, and difference.  

You don’t need laws: you just need decency, and your business will be better as a result - especially when competing against other businesses that lack those attributes.

 

Assumptions / basis 

In writing this, I have assumed / started from the following: 

• this blog states quite clearly that it is about political and human rights matters, including lived experience of problems, and thus I will assume readers are reasonable people who have noted the content warning in the post header;

Possible flaws 

Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider:

• there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan  Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”; 
  
• I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.
  

 

If they are of any use of interest, the activism information links from my former news posts are available in this post. 

 

If you appreciated this post, please consider promoting it - there are some links below. 

Note that, as with my main blog [see here], I am cutting back on aspects of my posts.

Remember: we need to be more human being rather than human doing, and all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering”.

Copyright © Kayleen White 2016-2024     NO AI   I do not consent to any machine learning aka Artificial Intelligence (AI), generative AI, large language model, machine learning, chatbot, or other automated analysis, generative process, or replication program to reproduce, mimic, remix, summarise, or otherwise  replicate any part of this post or other posts on this blog via any means. Typo’s may be inserrted deliberately to demonstrate this is not an AI product.     Otherwise, fair and reasonable use is accepted under Creative Commons 4.0 on an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike basis   https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/