Marc Bain* says there is evidence that certain toxic behaviours between employers and employees are becoming normalised, with potential effects on wellbeing.
Photo: Jan Prokes
In 2017, researchers at Yale University published a paper in the journal Cognition demonstrating that what people consider normal behaviour appears to be a mix of what’s common and what they see as ideal.
The findings suggested a significant consequence: “People might sometimes be able to separate out the average from the ideal, but they more often make use of a kind of reasoning that blends the two together into a single undifferentiated judgement of normality,” the researchers wrote in The New York Times.
They added: “Our work thus offers support for those who worry about ‘normalisation’: that things, simply by becoming more common, become more acceptable.”
The way society has normalised certain “toxic” behaviours was the subject of a popular thread on Reddit earlier this month.
After thousands of comments, two behaviours stood out with more upvotes and replies than others:
- Employers expecting workers to be available and ready to respond to requests well beyond the end of the workday.
- Ghosting, in which somebody ends a relationship by simply ceasing communication, without warning or explanation.
These behaviours are probably more often aggravating than life-threatening.
Still, the responses show they’re having real effects on wellbeing nonetheless and suggest problems with the way employers often treat employees.
In one extreme case of the always-on mentality, one commenter described being on leave while preparing for major surgery and still receiving a text from a manager asking if they could do their performance review over the phone.
Other examples tended to include expecting employees to respond to any request at a moment’s notice, without additional pay.
Some workers say they feel if they aren’t always available, they might be seen as bad employees and their job could be at risk.
The idea of being able to maintain a genuine balance between work and a separate personal life then becomes difficult, if not impossible.
As for ghosting, the complaints that got the most upvotes and replies weren’t about dating, which gave rise to the term, but about employers not following up about job applications.
Many organisations simply don’t reply to all applicants, of course, but jobseekers offered examples of going to interviews and organisations never replying to say they hadn’t gotten the job.
Applicants can be left with uncertainty for weeks or months about jobs they may need.
At this point, these behaviours have been normalised in the sense the Yale researchers described.
They’re so common now that they’ve also become seen as generally acceptable, if not exactly polite.
Ghosting, for instance, is even happening to employers.
Applicants disappear after interviews — or quit jobs by simply not showing up anymore — with enough frequency to catch the attention of the US Federal Reserve Bank, which monitors employment trends.
Technology, as posters pointed out on Reddit, owns some of the responsibility for these behaviours, which boil down to how we now communicate.
Countless employees carry phones with apps such as Slack, which means managers can reach them at any time.
With text and email — unlike face-to-face meetings or talking on the phone — conversations can end, and uncomfortable confrontations can be avoided, by simply not responding.
How “toxic” a person deems these behaviours may come down to their personal experience with them.
What’s clear is they’re not likely to disappear.
They’re just normal now.
* Marc Bain is fashion reporter for Quartz. He tweets at @marcbain_.
This article first appeared at qz.com.
