Who Was The Office Built For? Why Most Black Workers Want To Keep Working From Home
HALIFAX — As the Covid-19 pandemic wanes, employers are grappling with how (or if) to bring their employees back to the office.
While many employers hope to boost productivity or build an “office culture,” mental health advocates are urging them to consider their employees’ mental health.
Earlier this month, the Canadian Mental Health Association’s Nova Scotia Division and Placemaking P4G teamed up to bring more attention to the issue. CMHA Nova Scotia’s executive director Karn Nichols and P4G co-founder and CEO Bradley Daye spoke to members of the Halifax Chamber of Commerce about creating healthy workplaces for their employees to return to.
They revealed that a staggering number of workers experienced burnout and that returning to a physical office is likely much harder on some employees than others.
Who was the office built for?
It won’t surprise anyone with a desk job that most workers don’t want to go back to the office. But Daye highlighted new data that reveals a striking trend among those people.
A recent survey from Slack’s Future Forum found that only three percent of Black respondents wanted to return to the office, compared to 21 percent of white respondents.
Daye points out that most spaces in our society, including the traditional office workplace, were largely created by white people. That puts extra, subtle pressure on non-white folks in those spaces to conform to “white standards.”
For many Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC), working from home means not having to be as guarded in a space that wasn’t designed with them in mind.
“We think about the things that have been ingrained in our cultures and societies, there’s just not a lot of safe spaces for people of color – there’s really not,” Daye says.
“Especially growing up, I can’t think of many places in Halifax … where I could actually fully let my guard down or talk a certain way or be a certain way without feeling as if there was some sort of judgment or backlash or sort of generalizations being made about me.”
Research shows that feeling extends to the workplace for many racialized people.
This spring, a public opinion Survey from Maru found that 36 percent of racialized and Indigenous workers were concerned about being undermined in the workplace. Meanwhile, 49 percent agreed that making a mistake at work will be held against them and 35 percent said it was difficult to ask a direct manager for help.
All of this can have a significant impact on their mental health.
Mental health hazards in the office
Nichols points out that “being in an unfriendly or uncomfortable environment day after day is emotionally and physically exhausting.”
“We spend more than 50 percent of our time working, so the impact of working in that kind of environment reflects that,” she said.
Nichols says uncomfortable work environments can lead to burnout, difficulty sleeping, and concentration issues, and can also be associated with anxiety, depression, and substance misuse.
These types of environments can challenge a person’s ability to cope and significantly increase the chance of experiencing symptoms of a mental health condition.
With all that at stake, Daye says it’s not surprising many BIPOC, who are more likely to be in an uncomfortable environment at work, are keen to stay home.
Representation; strategy; competency
On some level, employers are beginning to come to terms with the fact that they aren’t creating spaces that are comfortable for everyone. Many are looking for ways to be better but Daye says not all of them are hitting the mark, or starting in the right place.
Daye says there are three important things organizations can focus on to meaningfully address the diversity of their teams: representation, strategy, and competency.
Competency means having a more thorough understanding of BIPOC communities and equity-deserving groups. It means learning about things like the Black and Indigenous history, how people have been impacted by that history, and using that knowledge to inform company policies.
Daye says it’s essential to go beyond the “broad strokes” to get “a really strong understanding of where those capacities are and aren’t.”
Representation, he says, is about more than just “how many” people you hire, but what positions you’re hiring for. What decision-making and managerial positions are going to BIPOC?
It’s also important, Daye says to have good representation in your vendors and suppliers, in your customer research, and in other aspects of your business.
“There’s so many different ways that you can build representation into your organization, not just through your staff,” he says.
Then there’s your strategy. Daye says organizations must ask how these things all tie into their policies. Do your staff understand your strategy? And have you set clear goals around each of them?
The CMHA also offers several workplace mental health training programs for Nova Scotia employers who want to create a healthier environment for their employees. More information on those programs is available here.
Trevor Nichols is Huddle’s editor, based in Halifax. Send him your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].