When Being “Indispensable” Means You’re Being Exploited
Being marginalized in your workplace can feel like a lot of things, but it usually starts with the sense that you’re having more bad days than good ones—maybe more bad days than you used to. Or maybe suddenly people you used to love working with or who loved working with you never respond to your messages anymore—but you’re certainly held accountable if you don’t respond to other people (or if those people don’t get you what you need—it’s your fault for not following up or badgering them, after all, not their fault for shirking their basic work responsibilities!)
Hi, I’m Alan Henry, author of Seen, Heard, and Paid: The New Work Rules for the Marginalized, and your humble master of ceremonies for this newsletter. Let me share a story ripped from my headlines—one that’s not uncommon, to be honest, and one that I’ve dealt with several times: How to embrace—but also reject—the concept of being indispensable at your job.
In Seen, Heard, and Paid, I talk about how you should be indispensable when you can be. Career experts and managers alike often tout that having unique skills or areas of expertise where you’re a subject matter expert makes you more employable and more resilient to being fired or laid off. After all, if you’re the office miracle worker, or you’re the one who runs a given system all on your own, it’s going to be pretty difficult for your employer to drop you because of draconian RTO measures or the next time a quarterly financial report looks bad (or rather, it makes their job harder, so they’re less likely to replace you with someone else…immediately, anyway. Don’t think that this translates into any real job security, as we mentioned last time.)
The problem with this is that being indispensable sometimes means that often, no work can happen without you present. This means that if you’re out of the office for any reason: let’s say illness, hospitalization, a new baby, a conference or convention, a vacation, (or, in my case it was over a full week of jury duty,) everyone sits on their hands and says “oh, they’ll deal with it when they’re back,” and if they start to get worried, you start getting emails in your inbox that say things like “I know you’re out of the office/on vacation/just had a baby/don’t even work here anymore but…”
It’s the “but” that’s most infuriating to me, because it’s essentially short for “I don’t respect you enough to acknowledge the fact that you’re not available, so I demand that you work when you shouldn’t to make my life easier.”
It’s a huge middle finger to you as a human, and to you as a person who deserves to have their boundaries honored and respected, and it’s a sign that the person asking you believes that whatever they need isn’t just important, it’s more important than you and whatever else you may have going on, because of course it is.
If this sounds familiar to you, pick your head up. We may live in a world where it’s fair to ask someone to work while they’re in a hospital bed but it’s not fair to tell those people to fuck all the way off and bust their own ass for a change, but we also live in a working world with agency, where there are a few things you can do about it.
Here are some things that I’ve used to protect my peace, but keep in mind that you’ll always be dealing with this at a: the mercy of your boss, who will either back you up or they won’t, and b: the sheer ego of the person violating your boundaries, which you have no control over, sadly.
Reaffirm Your Boundaries. If you have the psychological safety at work to do so, tell the person who’s violating your boundaries exactly what they’re doing and where they should go. (And while I know “fuck off” feels good to say, and may even be justified, you should probably try “As you know, I’m out of the office. X person can fill in for me if you need something, otherwise I’ll catch up on what’s been done in my absence when I’m back.”)
Manage Up. Your boss exists as a backstop for the work that you’ve been hired to do. If they can’t back you up while you’re out, ask them who can. In a perfect world, managers will say “let me know if you need anything while my direct report is out, and I’ll get it for you!” In the real world, managers are often busy enough that they say “eh, we’ll deal with it when they’re back,” and they just try to hold the line until that happens. I get it, I’ve been there. But when the shit hits the fan and there are deadlines and timelines associated with the work, by not picking it up while you’re not there to do it, they’re essentially punishing you for being away from your desk. That means you’re being punished for taking your duly accrued leave, having a baby, or hell, staying on the right side of the law and reporting for jury duty.
Acknowledge Your Responsibility, but also the Agency of Others. Yes, you have a job. Yes, your job duties are your responsibility, and work continues and the world turns while you’re away. All of those things are true. But by choosing to wait for you and by choosing to punish you for being out, your colleagues have exercised their agency—agency that you, in turn, no longer have because you’re not present. So while you should absolutely say that you’re happy to work on these things when you’re back in the office, you should also absolutely point out that by putting you in this position, they’re making a choice, and the responsibility for that choice is on them. And let them know right out of the gate that if there are delays because they chose to wait, even though they knew you weren’t there, those delays are their responsibility, not yours. While you’re at it, make sure your boss is CC’d on that one.
Rally the Troops. I’m willing to bet you have some friends in the office who would be willing to do you a solid or two. See if they’re willing to chime in and help you out a little while you’re out of the office. Pass whatever insipid request you got while you were out on to a colleague you trust, laugh about it, and remember that you’re not alone in this. Ask your boss to pull this person aside and see if they can help while you’re out. Ask a colleague you would get involved to talk to this person and get them to let up off of you. Circle the wagons a little bit and see if you have friends at work who will cover your back until you’re out of the hospital, back from the beach, or off of jury duty—talk to colleagues willing to extend you the empathy that others clearly aren’t.
Walk. The problem with situations like this is that they involve dealing with people’s mindsets, which isn’t even a little the same as the quality of your work, or your actual capabilities. It’s all about someone’s opinion of those capabilities. You can make millions of dollars in sales, land huge clients, and be an overall corporate rockstar, but if that one jerk in accounting thinks you’re unreliable or doesn’t respect your skills or abilities, they likely never will, and they’ll never give you a fair shake. That means the more you have to work with them, the more miserable you’ll be.
Like I said, always protect your peace, even in a job market that wants you to think that you’re worthless, and you should cling to whatever you have, even if it makes you miserable. You deserve better, and you deserve at least to work with people who respect your skills, abilities, time, and boundaries. And if they don’, and you can’t have that right nowt, you definitely owe it to yourself to find an environment where you can thrive.
[ Read This ]
The Power of Peer Groups (and How to Start One), by Dan Richards: Discrimination in the workplace takes many forms, that much is obvious, but there’s a reason I keep harping on marginalization specifically. It’s the go-to weapon for privileged groups these days: remove you from vision, reinforce the fact that you’re somehow the “other” or “different” or “not like everyone else.” The solution? Well, according to Dan Richards, writing in the Harvard Business Review, it’s peer groups. They come in multiple forms and can be private, like a handful of colleagues or friends who just keep in touch and share info, or semi-public like my favorite community of journalists of color, or they can be employer sponsored, like an ERG (employee resource group.) I’ve written about the importance of community too, but Richards goes further and explains how you can start your own peer group, and how to cater it to your—and your colleagues’—needs.
Use This App to Block Ads on Windows 11, by Justin Pot: It’s been a while since I’ve been around my old haunt—Lifehacker, I mean—but my friend Justin, an excellent tech journalist who I’ve had the pleasure of working with for years, did this piece for Lifehacker and it’s amazing. Not only is it in the old school Lifehacker style of “hey, this little download fixes a bunch of problems you may not even know you have, but you definitely have,” it works like a charm. First of all, great job Justin, I know you’re reading this, and for everyone else, go subscribe to his excellent newsletter. Then try this little app that takes all of the bloat, ads, and other nonsense out of Windows 11. I can vouch for it.
The Habits of Effective Remote Teams, by James Temperton: First of all, James Temperton is a friend and former WIRED colleague, and I miss him a bunch, but he’s landed a great gig at Posthog which allows him to write great pieces like this. James collects a bunch of amazing tips that workers and managers can use to build more effective remote teams, using the learnings of companies that work primarily as hybrid or fully-remote. James would know, heworked remotely with us at WIRED for years. I had this bookmarked, and I picked the piece back up because I’ve been thinking a bit about remote work lately—namely that if a company can’t guarantee you a place to physically be when you come to the office, I feel like it has no right to demand that you come to the office in the first place. That’s been running around my head lately—but then again, you guys know my feelings about what “return to office” really means.
[Try This]
If you need another newsletter to subscribe to (I know, you don’t, but stick with me here,) you should subscribe to my friend Kristin Wong’s newsletter, Untranslatable.
With every entry, Kristin picks a word that communicates something specific in another language, and dives into the meaning of the word, its sentiment, and how its used. But it’s not a linguistics article, I promise: Kristin weaves in her own experiences, her work, her family, her thoughts, her feelings, into the story. For example, one of my favorite words that Kristin has introduced me to is Freizeitstress, a German word or “leisure time stress,” which…well…first of all, I’m willing to bet I don’t have t explain it further, and second, is extremely me if you’ve ever met me.
But even though you ostensibly know what the word means already, you should still go read Kristin’s entry about it. Even though I got the gist of the word, her context really hammered it home for me.
I didn’t totally plan on the latter half of this newsletter being essentially shoutouts for friends, but here we are! On the bright side, you get to see some of the work of some of the incredible people who have inspired my own journey, and the friends that keep my spirits up as I go about my day. So sign up for Untranslatable, and then give a friend you haven’t talked to in a while some love. They’ll appreciate it, and you’ll feel great. Hey, that’s two recommendations, isn’t it?