You don't trust anyone at work?
Feeling cynical about your dismissive manager? Feeling skeptical about work-avoidant coworkers? Sounds familiar. But here's why we HAVE to take time and take stock and make sense and build trust.
Hey there, Mode/Switchers! It’s stunning, but this is it for this newsletter in 2024. (The team’s final podcast episode comes out this Friday. We’ll talk with Matt Halteman, author of Hungry Beautiful Animals, about good and bad eating at work. Just in time for the holiday party.)
But, gosh, think what we’ve seen over the past year, you and I, as we’ve squinted at the American workplace. I’m grateful that we’ve had this chance to reimagine work as a site for being more fully human.
For me, this year’s taught me to ask, How do we live & work like the humans we want to be when the world just keeps on coming to an end? I think that’s the question for org leaders and team members alike.
Speaking of which: below you’ll find, just like usual, a skimmable but deep-dive-able trend, study, story, and shift. Today, we’ll focus on this question:
When it feels like we have only two bad options—blunt cynicism or blind faith—how do we even try to build trust in working community?
A Trend
First, let’s try to understand some of our trust-scarce conditions.
A shocking number of American workers are sneakily overemployed. I don’t just mean they’re doing too much work. I mean, they’re holding at least two full-time jobs, drawing separate salaries, and hiding it all from their bosses. There are some dudes who hold as many as five full-time jobs. Talk about beast mode.
The pandemic made overemployment possible. Remote work and the rise of AI made it practical (especially for millennial dudes in tech). And economic pressures made it seem essential.
Short-term, overemployment seems to work, especially for those making six-figure salaries. But long-term, overemployment’s risky: plenty of workers are fired for moonlighting. More managers now demand proof that people have really and truly quit one job before taking another. Plus, overemployment burns people out.
This week’s trend is just one way that trust breaks down between employers and employees. Quiet quitting and wage theft and sexual harassment metastasize mistrust. We lose goodwill. We drain work quality. We brown out.
So, why can’t we just say, “Hey, this isn’t working. We’re dying here.” Maybe because managers aren’t listening. But even that’s a trickier problem than it sounds.
A Study
Team leaders, it seems, actively avoid listening to their workers. As the Harvard Business Review put it, managers go out of their way to NOT hear what their employees have to say. Whut?
Is your dismissive manager just an arrogant jerk? Is there too much ego at that end of the board room table? Is your boss stuck in a narrow way of thinking?
Maybe. But organizational research’s proposing another explanation as well.
One study in Organization Science theorizes that managers don’t listen because they fear they can’t make the change their workers want. That’s weird. We usually assume that managers don’t listen because they’re power-mongers. But what if managers actually feel short on power? What if managers think that change will take organizational time and energy that they just don’t have?
I used to think that managers didn’t listen to employees because they thought the workers were whiners who couldn’t possibly understand the big picture. This study suggests it’s the managers who feel cornered into short-term thinking.
Am I being soft on leaders? Do you feel skeptical? Check out this article, “Why Managers Do Not Seek Voice from Employees: The Importance of Managers’ Personal Control and Long-Term Orientation.” (If you don’t have access, you can find a summary here.)
The bad news for organizational trust-builders is that, all too often, managers feel like they have to stay in their lizard brains in order for their companies to survive.
A Story
For my latest book Digital Overwhelm, I’ve interviewed a lot of rising professionals about working community. One guy told me, in a follow-up interview, that his managers so distrusted their workers that they installed surveillance cameras, not because they thought they could catch anyone avoiding work. Everybody already knew that was going on. But distrust had intensified to a point that managers felt they had no other option but to play threatening mind games.
There has to be another way to deal with our trust problems besides avoiding work and pointless cameras.
In the late 2010s, I interviewed fifty organizational leaders about spiritual and relational dynamics in their companies. I’ll never forget the company president who told me that, when her organization lost their way, she shut down operations for a few days, so they could rediscover what they were doing, what they were about. They pulled out the markers and started slapping multi-colored sticky notes on the west wall of the office.
Shutting down the company was radical therapy. While they were closed for business, they couldn’t be making money or finding clients or keeping track of numbers. But the radical technique worked. They found alignment. They rediscovered complex approaches to their problems. And they became profitable again.
I think that high-trust organization’s radical move suggests a mode/switch.
A Shift
I propose that organizations take a sabbath. Or, in secular terms, we all just need to stop for a week. Close the doors, shut down the phones, gather in the biggest room, make a lot of coffee, spring for scones, and talk to each other. I know this sounds like a hippie idea. But how else can we move from the back to the front of our brains?
Moving faster and working harder won’t solve the problems we have, because moving faster and working harder produce conditions of mistrust that keep us in crisis.
Quick example: at my university, I’m on a task force to design a framework for dealing with AI in the classroom. Ha. Talk about mistrust. AI makes cheating ridiculously easy. But our students can rightly say that every workplace they’ll soon enter will be saturate with AI use and misuse. When professors use shrewd short-term fixes—like white-fonting gotcha phrases in assignment prompts—their short-term thinking dissolves trust and disables thought. We need a reboot in our approaches to teaching.
But here’s the thing: most of my fellow task-forcers are profoundly overworked. The very forces that make the task force essential—screaming fast tech development and digital overwhelm—make scheduling a meeting feel impossible.
Organizations everywhere suffer the same conundra. The accelerations of AI, the weird warmth of the past few winters, the persistence of discrimination, the irresistible force of scrolling social media—none of these will be solved by working harder and faster. We need time to take stock and make sense. We need to find our way together towards the richly creative and emotionally intelligent engagement where trust thrives.
So, what do you say? Can we propose an organizational sabbath sometime in 2025?
This may be it for the newsletter this year, but you can find alternate routes to workplace wisdom over the holidays!
Just talked with Google’s Sally Ivester yesterday, planning an interview on the Mode/Switch Pod in 2025. Let me commend her newsletter. She’s offering scripts for Gen Z survival in corporate culture.
For an intriguing counter-example to this week’s newsletter, see WorkLife’s critique of oversharing.
Don’t miss Bruce Daisley’s take on the “enshittification of work.”
Nobody talks about mistrust more creatively or insightfully than Kyla Scanlon.
Check out my work-culture content on Blue Sky, Insta, and TikTok.
And, finally, a gift idea for the wisdom-seeking working professional in your life: my new book Digital Overwhelm builds on original research to discuss six approaches to digital communication in work culture today. It’s a stocking stuffer for the reader who likes big questions and good stories.
Listen While You Work
And because you need a soundtrack for surviving trust falls at work, Hannah Sherbrooke—our soon-to-graduate Mode/Switch communications coordinator—has one last playlist for this year.