Mental Health
The writer, Saleha Suleman (Cape Town, South Africa) is a scientist and Public Health specialist and has been involved in leadership and community service positions from a young age.
M
y husband and I recently started a careers podcast, and something that our first guest said really stuck with me. He said, be a good boss to yourself. He urged listeners that if you have your own business, that is even more reason to treat yourself well and not exploit yourself.
In today’s world, most of us have more than one identity. I, for example, am a scientist, a public health researcher, but also a travel planner and blogger, hiker, writer, and involved in lots of social justice initiatives. I am sure you can say the same about yourself, too. So now, more than ever, with hustle culture and people no longer being boxed into one career, this advice of being a good boss to yourself rings true.
However, this also rings true in conventional work settings. I have been fortunate enough to be part of many different teams, and that means being exposed to different leadership styles, different working methods. Most recently, I was part of a team where our managers were truly open to us making mistakes. They genuinely saw it as a learning opportunity, and you wouldn’t believe how different this felt to my previous experiences. I’ve worked in teams where managers micromanaged, wanting to check every output, controlling how or when things happen. But in those teams, I often found that this leadership style would breed mistrust in your team members, reduce motivation, and take away any joy from the work.
I had a colleague who used to time her lunch breaks religiously to make sure she wasn’t eating into her work, sometimes even eating at her desk. For her, a 30-minute lunch break meant less than or exactly 30 minutes. If she went overboard, all hell could break loose. Yet, she was the earliest to clock in and the last to leave. And this was expected of her, as well as her other colleagues. On days that she clocked out at exactly 5 pm, she was expected to provide an explanation as to why she was leaving early. Work never ends, though, and at some point, her mental health started deteriorating even before she realised it. She was constantly anxious, didn’t enjoy her job anymore, dreaded going to work, and even on weekends, was constantly thinking about doing work.
Now, if you’re an employer, I know what you’re thinking – “how do I get my team to actually do the work then?” You might think that micromanaging delivers results according to your experience. Or, if you’re an employee who will continue working until the task is done, even when your colleagues clock out, you may be thinking, “But that’s not fair”. And both are valid concerns. As someone who values work-life balance, I can tell you that spending more time on a task does not equate to doing a great job. Your goal in teams should not be to ensure everyone is working as hard as possible for all 8 hours of the workday, but rather that the tasks are completed well in a reasonable amount of time. If a task takes employee A 3 days to complete, and employee B 3 hours, does that automatically mean that employee 1 did a better job, or that employee 2 is more efficient? And in this situation, who do you think will be less burnt out and more satisfied with their job? Measuring work should be based on outcomes and outputs, not the time spent on a task. As a result, they will also continue to produce quality work for longer.
It’s also important to recognise different working styles. A team will always have diversity in the way that people complete their tasks, and recognising these will prove useful. You can view these differences as strengths and assign tasks based on your team’s diversity. For instance, employee C might not have the best written outputs, but have great people skills. Employee D might work better by themselves, and employee E might spend a lot of time socialising. Recognising what each employee’s strengths are in relation to your company’s work will save you a lot of time and energy! Not only will this improve productivity, but it will also instil a sense of trust and confidence in your team.
Most importantly, though, and I am sure you’ve heard this one, I have learnt that respecting people’s boundaries will play a significant role in breeding positive work culture. As a team leader or colleague, you should not expect people to respond to your emails outside of work hours. WhatsApp and calls after work-hours should be literal life-or-death situations, and making someone feel guilty for not being available at a time they didn’t need to be is also a no-no.
In the modern corporate race, “resilience” is often used as a synonym for “endurance”, the ability to grind through exhaustion without breaking. When we view work through an Islamic lens, though, resilience isn’t about how much pressure a person can withstand; it’s about Muru’ah (honour and dignity) and the sacred responsibility of maintaining the balance (Mizan) between work, self, and the Creator. We know that Islam strongly supports the principles of holistic wellbeing, and you’d be surprised at how making small changes in your workplace to support this can improve the workplace environment.
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