Work Should Make You Well

If you google the phrase “working is making me sick,” you get over 99 million hits. Search engines work so quickly that we don’t usually take notice of the number of hits we get, but I’ll tell you that 99 million citations is an enormous number. Repeat the exercise, substituting the word “smoking”  for “working,” and you get under 4 million citations. That’s 96% fewer articles about the health hazards of smoking, despite the fact that smoking is well established to cause illness and death.

The sheer volume of postings on work-induced illness, though they may not meet rigorous scientific standards, demonstrate a concerning trend. Though people can’t put their collective fingers on why, they know their employment is undermining their health. Granted, some of the “working is making me sick” articles are about toxic chemical exposure or air quality or other genuinely hazardous workplace conditions, but most of the articles and posts describe jobs which cause people so much stress they feel ill. People know there is something insidiously harmful about the way in which they earn their livelihoods.

I know this feeling. I used to dread going to work. I spent my days calculating when I’d be able to leave, but I was never truly able to leave because I took work home with me each night. And I was sick because of it — exhausted, yet unable to sleep; racked with anxiety; plagued with neck and shoulder pain; overweight because I’d eat to make myself feel better. I thought this state was normal.

In fact, it was normal. Pretty much everyone I worked with felt like me.

Only after I stepped away and gained a degree of clarity which was impossible in my previous overstressed, eyes-on-the-next-crisis state, did I realize that my former employer treated people like machines. Literally. We were managed using the very same processes designed to optimize the efficiency of machines and assembly lines. Machines don’t slack off, according to this thinking, so neither should people.

People aren’t machines. They need things which machines don’t, things which go beyond process manuals. Things like friendship and laughter. These intangibles are what make and keep people healthy.

People are capable of leaps of creativity and productivity which machines can never achieve. In order to make these leaps, people need to be treated like people. It’s not hard to know what people need — just look at the 99 million search results and do the opposite.

Ask these questions for and about yourself:

• Is feeling awful a legitimate price of doing business?
• Does the work I do genuinely require that I sacrifice my health?
• Am I more productive or more effective when I’m ill or chronically stressed?

If you happen to be a corporate executive or a business owner or a manager or the head of an HR department, ask yourself these questions from the standpoint of your employees.

Creating a healthy workplace comes from creating a healthy culture. A culture where people are given what they need to thrive as people. This tiny change in mindset can make a world of difference in the health of an organization and the people within it.

Work should do more than give us a salary. Meaningful work done in a collegial environment can sustain us and allow us thrive. Work can — and should — make us well.