Have you taken a step back to reflect on the impact of social media, AI, and the pandemic on today’s employee mindset? A work environment where isolation, loneliness, and self-entitlement have become the norm… an environment that is losing its connectedness and is becoming increasingly dehumanized.
What’s it like being in a “ME” work culture?
We live in a world that’s all about ME. We want to be loved, appreciated, adulated, respected, and credited for literally everything we do.
We want to earn lots of money, work when we want to, do what we want to, and not have a boss watching over our shoulders every day. We want ME in charge.
We want to have an opinion on pretty much everything and choose where we get our knowledge. ME has an opinion, and that’s all that matters.
We need these constant little endorphin hits when someone gives us attention, whether it’s a social media post or a call out at work. It’s all about ME… and as much as possible!
We communicate most of our time over text and talk to people less and less because we hide in our little ME cocoons. Talking to people requires effort and our full attention, and it’s not all about ME.
We have become super-sensitive to criticism. The slightest accusation or hint of negativity toward us makes us get very defensive. How dare you accuse me of not being perfect!
We repeatedly tell people all the amazing things we do so we can constantly get credit. Why wait for praise when we can just praise ME?
We invest our time in people who can advance our ME agendas.
We avoid people who have little to offer ME.
We spend less social time with our colleagues because team bonding is not very important to ME.
We spend time learning new things that interest ME, not things we need to learn about to further our work skills and knowledge.
We rarely work evenings or weekends anymore. ME doesn’t need to go over and above unless it benefits ME.
We “like” things on social media to further our ME network and never bother to read the articles. The authors should be genuinely grateful for our endorsements because they are from ME.
It’s really all just about ME, ME, ME!
“ME” is the world we live in, but we need to focus more on “US” to improve work culture
Can you really blame employees for feeling dehumanized when their bosses keep pontificating about bots and agents replacing and augmenting their work activities? Can you blame them for feeling lonely and isolated at home, performing mundane activities with little outlet to enjoy themselves? Can you blame them for needing recognition and appreciation for being human in an environment where there is so much focus on meeting metrics, reducing costs, and sucking the very humanity out of the workplace with constant technology upgrades and new deployments?
People don’t suddenly decide to become selfish. This is a product of these dehumanizing dynamics in the work environment, which results in people crying out for affirmation and a sense of connectedness that is missing from our work lives.
Bottom-line: We must reverse this culture, but it will take a lot of refocusing
I would love to provide a definitive guide to employers and employees on how to make our work environments more connected, but this is a blog, not a detailed guide to HR, so I’ll leave you with three simple activities to get back on the right track:
Let’s get to know each other better. Get off the Team, Zoom, Slack, whatever text system we use for company communication and call each other up. Get to know each other as HUMANS again and not as mere work colleagues who provide a means to an end. We don’t even need to like each other but just behaving like humans and not text-generating cyborgs is a huge step to improving our connectedness and work culture.
Focus on work as a positive, not a negative experience. It’s so easy to be negative; we all go there, and it’s not a great place to be. When you feel negativity coming knocking, take a step away and rethink why you are feeling this way. Staring at a screen 10 hours a day is just bad for your brain, your eyes, and your health and saps your energy and enthusiasm. So take more breaks in the day, go for a walk, hit the gym, or just call someone up to talk.
Spend less time on social media. I am not the patron saint of this, but so many people are wasting an inordinate amount of time seeking their little endorphin hits and not getting any actual real value from this. Unless you have something profound to share with the world, why spend half your day just trawling through digital junk when you can spend more time improving your own work or client relationships just by talking to them? Social media can be a great thing for developing your network etc., but there is a line between some networking and just wasting hours a day on this mind-numbing activity.
Posted in : Agentic AI, Artificial Intelligence, Employee Experience, HR Strategy, Social Networking
