I have tried to write this blog post a few times
and each time given up halfway through. That is because it is a very personal
confession, but a confession that I hope a lot of people from diverse
backgrounds working in television can relate to but rarely acknowledge:
My name is Marcus Ryder and for large stretches
of my adult life I have been lonely at work.
No one likes to admit being lonely. It is seen
as an admission of failure.
I have also been worried about admitting to
loneliness just in case any of my colleagues take it as an insult.
The truth is while there have been periods of my
working life I have been lonely I have rarely worked on a
production, or been part of a team, where there hasn’t been at least one
friendly face or someone I would consider a friend.
The apparent contradiction goes to the heart of
one of the unspoken issues regarding diversity.
I’ve observed women working in all male teams,
I’ve seen the one disabled member of staff working with all able-bodied people,
the problem even applies to parents of young children working in teams of
young childless colleagues. There are large parts of your life that people from
diverse backgrounds simply find difficult to share with their co-workers when
their experiences are so different.
Having large parts of your identity you cannot
share with your colleagues can distance you at work and ultimately it can
create loneliness.
And loneliness at work is a real problem.
Gallup regularly conducts employee engagement
work surveys, one of the key questions they ask is “Do you have a best friend
at work?”. Steven Mirander of
Cornell University commenting on people
without “best friends at work” said in an interview in 2014 “I would bet
my bottom dollar that people who are lonely and disengaged at work deliver far
less discretionary effort than people who have a support system or a go-to
person [at work].”
This not only affects the performance of the company
the lonely person is working for but in turn also affects the career prospects
of the worker.
Although anyone can suffer from loneliness at
work it is disproportionately a diversity issue.
According to a collection of essays published in
2014 by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (UK Branch) titled “Alone
in the crowd: loneliness and diversity”
people from diverse backgrounds such as ethnic minority groups and disabled
people are more at risk of suffering from loneliness and this loneliness can
perpetuate or aggravate many of the problems faced by these people already.
Another study by Sigal
Barsade and Hakan Ozcelik also concluded that
“co-workers can recognize this loneliness and see it hindering team member
effectiveness.” However they rarely understand the reasons behind this
loneliness and instead just want to get rid of the “underperforming” colleague.
Loneliness can be tackled through good
management. Organising support networks for employees across an organisation,
or even pan-industry, that are wider than the immediate team someone happens to
be working in where they are the only BAME, disabled, female of LGBT worker.
It helps to acknowledge the reality that a
manager might not want to promote someone from a diverse background who is
underperforming but instead of demonising them give them the tools to recognise why the person is
underperforming.
Finally in writing this piece I have googled the
subject of workplace loneliness and while you can find people talking about the
issue no one wants to admit experiencing the problem themselves often writing pieces anonymously. And even my “confession” is slightly cowardly as I am only
making it now when I am in a period of my career when I am not experiencing
loneliness. But until people from diverse backgrounds can admit all the work
place obstacles we face, loneliness included, we will not be able to make the
progress we deserve.
i like this post, thanks
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