With over 27K followers, r/antiwork is turning into a popular subreddit “for those who want to end work.” One recent post asked, “who would want to work here?” Our Culture? We don’t have one.
You get paid pretty decently to output good work when you want and how you want. We only talk on Slack when it’s absolutely necessary and never by video or voice under any circumstances.
The OP u/book_of_chairs wrote the post “to elicit a response and inspire interaction in the thread.” With over 34.2K upvotes and more than 2.4K comments, it certainly garnered a lot of attention. Many people responded positively to the thread. People are tired of meetings, whether in-person or through video. There’s an attitude of “just let me work and get paid.”
Work culture is changing. Is your business keeping up?
What is workplace culture?
Factorial HR defines it as “the attitudes and behaviors of employees within an organization.”
There’s the family mentality. “We’re all family at work.” Ugh. Work is a contract, not a family.
Some places have a hierarchal culture, in which structure and authority play a role in how things get done. Some work cultures are market-driven. Results are all that matter.
In a healthy work culture, employees can thrive and grow while getting results that benefit the business.
But the norm in today’s society is unhealthy work culture.
Managers don’t effectively communicate. There is an unhealthy work-life balance. Employees leave at a high turnover rate, costing the company money in training and time. Company values are often just statements that don’t translate through to protocols. Executives want to get a high ROI but don’t pay a fair wage to their employees.
Workplace culture drives employee satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
Positivity promotes productivity
The Reddit post takes the POV that people don’t want a work culture. As nice as that sounds, every workplace has a culture, whether good or bad. I’d like to suggest that employees are tired of outdated strategies and business models where employees aren’t paid well, given few benefits, and expected to put their job first. Employers who treat their employees well and pay them accordingly don’t have as many problems getting and keeping good team members.
Work culture is changing – is your business keeping up?
To attract top talent, your business can’t rely on how things used to be. Work culture was changing before the pandemic, and now with remote work on trend, it may be more difficult to find talented people who care about your business to work in-house.
Take a good look at your work culture and ask yourself, “is this somewhere I’d want to work?” If it isn’t, maybe you should think about your culture and what needs to change to pull in strong team members who can get work done.
