USA's Simone Biles looks on during the artistic gymnastics women's team final during the Tokyo 2020 ... [+]
After four-time Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles withdrew from the competition in Tokyo 2021 Olympics, citing the need to focus on her well-being, mental health issues checked in again at the workplaces doorway. Biles’ decision opened up a more significant discussion over prioritizing mental health over performance and social media.
What happened to Simone is no different from what many employees suffer every day, especially at the time of annual and semi-annual performance evaluations. Every evaluation is like an Olympic test: you have to prove you are invincible, meet all the objectives, and be better than the rest. So should you say you don’t feel good or that you need some PTO? No, that could hurt your ranking or send you to PIP (Performance Improvement Plan).
A McKinsey study shows that fewer than one in ten employees describe their workplace as free of stigma on mental or substance-use disorders. Structural stigma is a type of discrimination that can occur when workplace norms constrain resources and opportunities and, therefore, impair the individual. Thousands of employees feel this way but have a hard time expressing and sharing. Simone said “It's OK sometimes to even sit out the big competitions to focus on yourself, because it shows how strong of a competitor and person that you really are, rather than just battle through it." Employees have also found ways to “talk” about it anonymously on apps such as Blind. You can find multiple comments by real people saying how stressful it is to be PIP’d such as “Hire and develop the best, remove the rest.”
Some of the threatening practices that impact stress and mental health are:
- Rankings in which all employees are ranked on a best to worst scale. Through the annual performance evaluations, managers communicate where employees are in a company ranking. Whoever is at the top 5% of the ranking, gets all the attention: the trips, the training sessions, the stocks, the development opportunities. The last 5-10% is on the verge of being dismissed. The other 90% hopes not to go to “focus” on the next evaluation.
- Annual and semi-annual evaluations focused only on numbers: companies have a process of providing feedback to the employee on an annual or semi-annual basis. In most cases, these conversations are the only feedback employees receive throughout the year. Unfortunately, these sporadic feedback sessions are used to summarize main events that happened in the past, in the last 6 or 12 months, and build a story to justify why they deserve, or not, a salary increase or opportunity for development. Overemphasizing results and analytics or what “should” be makes people operate in the NEA, according to Richard Boyatzis’s book, a state of fight or flight, fear and anxiety. They get more closed to share and more focused on being defensive than on interacting positively, and shut down the capacity to change or learn.
- PIPs and URA quotas: some companies publicly mandate an 8% to 10% of URA or unregretted attrition, a percentage of firings to be met per team. Now in the post-pandemic some companies have even increased the quota. Like what happened to Simone, this "focus" or PIP becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the employees who are not top performers end up performing even worse than expected as they are burn out. Even leaders get stressed out by the process, as in most cases they need to choose to sacrifice good employees just to meet the URA.
How are employees motivated to help each other when they can put their own career or salary at risk? Unfortunately, all these programs may look like great models to raise top performers. Instead, they burn most employees out, driving down their self-worth and productivity while destroying team building.
This makes sense considering that statistics show 85% of employees are exhausted and 41% want to change jobs. Companies need to look for different ways to motivate their employees while reducing mental stress. My next article will discuss some practices that can help reduce stress in the workplace.
