The motivational phrase I’ve probably heard most often in the last year has been “we’re all in this together.” This exists in the same bucket of motherhood statements as “let’s do what it takes,” and “just keep going while we figure all of this out.” In other words, let’s white-knuckle our business through this and then if we’re not burnt-out at some distant point in the future, we’ll address all the many things that make it hard for you to do your job. A straw poll taken from friends working in Sydney, London and New York, has produced some of the greatest blurry-lined challenges they’ve experienced in the past year, and ways they navigated them...

LATE NIGHT EMAIL PING PONG

This is not a new thing, but it came up a lot. “I really can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think flexible working might have made this worse,” says my friend Tina, a working mother in New York who has been pushing for flexible work for many years. “The problem is that we are still learning how to navigate different work schedules now that people are designing their own workday. And what I’ve noticed sis that it’s enabled all the crazy, never-offline workaholics.” For instance, she now starts her day at 8am, logs off at 3pm, and then gets online again at 8pm to finish her workday. “I’m loving it, but I will notice that as I’m filing reports later at night, senior colleagues who have already worked a full day are responding in real time, which just creates a culture of always being on.” That wasn’t the plan. How does she deal? “I log off at 10pm and don’t look at my emails until 8am the next morning - but it’s hard.” 

COLLECTING INTEL ON COLLEAGUES

As teams have needed to reduce in size and head counts shrink in response to the economic strain of the pandemic, my friend Helen found herself in the awkward position of being the one her manager turned to when deciding who to cut. “She was asking for dirt on colleagues I had worked with for years, who did good work. And it’s so fraught because on the one hand, you feel good because you’re thinking, ‘if they’re asking me then my name must be on the list of people who are staying,’ but on the other hand, I’m thinking, ‘you know these people do good work, and you’re paid twice as much as me to make hard decisions.’” Her strategy: she treated the questions like she did her kids asking how babies are made. “Firstly, be honest and extremely technical in your language, because it kills the conversation fast. So I talked about the contributions I thought various colleagues made. And then, distraction is key. I am only half-joking. I tried to suggest other ways I thought the business could save on costs that would potentially preserve head count. I don’t know if it helped, but we all still have jobs so maybe.”

ZERO GAME FACE

When Brene Brown talked about leaders showing vulnerability, I’m pretty sure she didn’t mean outright losing their shit in front of colleagues… crying…saying they had no idea what would happen next. My friend Jacinta found it both comforting and unnerving at the same time: “Up until a few months ago, our CEO would get on these All Hands Zoom calls and use pretentious jargon like the business has “green shoots” and that despite “green stick fractures” we were all taking away “valuable learnings” and then we’d have a team catch up with my manager afterwards, who would be like, “I honestly don’t know if we’ll have jobs next week but you guys are great.”” Refreshing, yes, Distracting, absolutely. “You can obsess about that stuff for hours because it’s all just fuelled by anxiety. I had to tune it out, and decided to worry about a new job once this one was gone, rather than stress twice.”