Are Your Coworkers Hazing You?
Workplace hack: don't be a can-do suck-up. It's bad for you and bad for the hazers.
Welcome to a work-culture newsletter about making better choices when work’s a lot. This week we’re talking about workplace hazing.
Not harassment, just to be clear. Harassment’s unwelcome and isolating behavior like bullying. The boundaries are porous, but those behaviors are their own deal.
But I am talking about workplace hazing, task-assigning behaviors in which seasoned coworkers embarrass or exhaust newer coworkers, not in order to isolate them, but in order to socialize them. The consequences are intense, especially for mental wellness.
Trade journals don’t talk about workplace hazing enough, maybe because it’s often unconscious and sometimes well-intentioned. The script goes like this: We all had to endure it. If you want to belong here, so do you.
You might be hazed if you’re new to your org and you’re…
assigned impossible or constantly changing goals
enduring unfair criticisms
asked to do strange or uncomfortable tasks
making everybody else snicker—and you’re not sure why
So, let’s do a little mode/switch therapy with a trend, a study, a story, and a switch.
And, hey, btw, welcome to all our new subscribers! Hit reply-all and let me know what you’re hoping for in the Mode/Switch Newsletter. And say what’s saving your life at work these days.
A Trend
I’ve been straw-polling peeps in my life about hey-hanging. Nobody’s heard of it, it seems, but everybody’s experienced it.
Think of this trend as workplace communication (prevalent on Slack) in which your supervisor says, “Hey, you gotta minute around 4:15 this afternoon? Got something to talk over with you.”
Yeesh. An email like this does two confusing things: (1) addresses you casually and (2) makes you expect the worst. Your lizard brain goes into war-zone mode.
Hey-hanging is a species of hazing, as a recent article in Forbes shows. Glossing Jared Pope, founder and CEO of Work Shield, the piece suggests that hey-hanging “might also be a part of a larger toxicity issue” in a working community, because the hey-hanged “interpret the delayed response as indifference, lack of consideration—even rejection.”
Read more about Peterson’s indispensable take on stupid work socialization here.
A Study
“Which job would you stay at longer,” asked an Achievement Work Institute survey—to which only 28% of workers replied that they’d stay at a job “where I don’t feel supported, cared for, or valued but am payed 30% more.” (Emphasis added.)
When we talk abut wage transparency, we’re usually thinking about dollars. But “emotional salary” matters, too. Never heard of it? According to one study), it’s “a non-economic compensation that complements monetary salaries, where the needs of the partners to be able to cope with the demands of the company is given priority.”
Need to gauge your own emotional salary? Check out this study in the Indian Journal of Science and Technology. If you’re not feeling the research mode, there’s a more accessible discussion in Fast Company here.
I bring this up because hazing does havoc to the emotional salary of your org.
A Story
You can find stories about workplace hazing on Reddit or LinkedIn. But I want to tell you a story from my own working life about the opposite of hazing.
I was on a furnace installation crew, and my job that morning was to insert the floor boots—the tin fixtures that go beneath HVAC floor registers. They were harder to install than expected so I reached for my hammer to bang them home.
My manager came around a few minutes later and said, “Hey, this looks like shit.” He was angry about the beat-up boots. But he took a moment to explain why he was feeling that way: “Most people won’t see this,” he admitted. “But someday when other contractors come along and rip up the carpet and take out the registers, they’ll see this beat-up metalwork, and they’ll know we didn’t do our job.”
His communication stung. But it also made me feel like I was part of the crew. He had given me this job, not because it would amuse him, but because he trusted me and because he wanted me to get it right. He was socializing me without hazing me.
A Switch
The worst thing about hazing is that you may actually enjoy being hazed. Especially if, like me, you’re a pleaser or an achiever, you may see it as a challenge to get people to salute you. (Enneagram 2s and 3s, I’m looking at you.)
Hazing tempts you to be Ethan Hunt taking on Mission Impossibles on the job. But look, the hazing message won’t self-destruct. You will. Your “mission accepted” mode just not smart. On your worst days (and, as you go along, there will be more and more of these), trying to impress the hazers burns away your sense of personal efficacy. (You’ll keep asking, “Do I actually suck at this job?”)
This week’s mode/switch is from mission accepted to mission redefined. If you’re getting hazed, that means you have to give up on trying to impress. If you can find people who will tell you what the job’s really about, do so! If you can’t, you’ll have to be watchful. You’ll have to find your own measures of success. For my research participants in my latest book, that often meant adopting a wellness routine or spiritual practice.
If you’re doing the hazing, this mode/switch means recognizing that you are actually needed by your newer coworkers. I bet you’ve had a hard time coming up in this organization. I believe you’ve even had something like organizational trauma or spiritual abuse.
But, look, hazing’s just as bad for the hazers as for the hazed. It perpetuates a working community based on scarcity rather than generosity.
Heads-up! My latest book, Digital Overwhelm, is now available on Amazon audio. Sign up for an Audible account and download it as one of your two free books!
From My Mixed-up Files
What I’m Reading - Just finished Sally Rooney’s Normal People. Super talented novel. Rooney’s depictions of sex are integral to her character development. And, honestly, if you’re struggling with wanting to be hazed—because you have mixed-up ideas about what will make you feel challenged and fulfilled—this is the next book you should read.
What I’m Buying Next - A pitchfork. I’ve been putting vegetable leavings in a compost bin for a while now, along with some leaves and grass, too. But I haven’t been stirring the stuff. I need me a pitchfork to make me some soil.
What I’m Skimming - Matt Iglesias is indispensable reading on the upcoming election. Want a sample? See his “27 Takes on the 2024 Election.”
What I’m Watching - The documentary Will & Harper. Indispensable if you’re trying to get inside the emotional experience of gender-transitioning. And for us, Mode/Switchers, it’s interesting because it’s about a lifetime of work and friendship.
LWYW
Just found out, again, yesterday (because, yes, I’ve asked before) that Hannah Sherbrooke, the Mode/Switch communications coordinator, is moving on to other workplaces, come this December. For now, though, she’s our unfazeable (unhazeable?) graphic designer and audio editor.
Thanks to her, you have another Listen While You Work playlist.