Increased openness about mental health in the workplace is a good idea — reducing the stigma and discrimination, but sometimes good intentions backfire. "My boss has started asking us to share reflections on mental health as an icebreaker at mandatory meetings," explains a staffer at a large organisation."The people who jump in first set the tone by going all-in and sharing super personal details about medications and therapy. It creates a lot of implicit pressure to share something similarly personal." An employee at another company writes: "I work in an office of a large company. The work my team does is often stressful, so sometimes staff morale suffers. The managers of my team have created a feelings chart that has giant emoji representing various levels of being happy, stressed, and angry. There are stickers of all our names that we're meant to put next to the emoji representing how we're feeling about work at the start and end of the day ... it's compulsory and participation is sometimes enforced." (Via slate.com)
Subway ads in New York
Subway ads during the UN General Assembly in New York.
"I worked in a rural petrol station/ garage when I was in high school. One evening I was working and there were some pretty bad storms brewing. It didn't take long for there to be a fairly large group of people stopped at the station to find some shelter. I didn't think much of it, wasn't the first time it had happened, but then they started blowing the tornado sirens. All the sudden there's a bunch of adults and families looking at little 16-year-old me looking for answers. There's no basement so I did the first thing I could think of and shoved them all in the walk-in cooler. Shut us all in and rode out the storm. When it passed I went out and a big plate glass window had broken and some stuff had blown around the store. All the people came out of the cooler and were pretty much like, "See you later" and left. I was pretty much left there by myself — like what just happened?"
