A little stressed out
I wasn't sure if I wanted to post about this or not; it's something sort of personal, but also is sort of about other people, and it's 100% about my workplace. It's not hard to discover who I am and for whom I work, but I try not to write too much publicly about either.
But I need to vent somewhere other than to my manager or coworkers. And I don't have my journal in front of me, so here I am.
As of August 1st, I am losing half of my team to "voluntary retirement". There's no secret here - I don't think anyone believes that this is anything other than a way to cut staff without the negative optics of mass layoffs. I don't know what packages people were offered but I bet it's a lot cheaper for the company to offer early retirement instead of severance.
Did I mention that my team (including myself) is 4 people? That means I'll be down to 2 (2.5, as someone from another team will be taking on some of the work). Frankly, the workload is manageable at this number - when no one is taking any time off. Add in vacation time, it's incredibly difficult and puts stress on employees, making them feel like they can't take vacation.
My company: use your vacation days! Take time off!
Also my company: do the same work with fewer staff
I'm feeling the stress already. But not because of the extra work that's coming, or trying to figure out how to cover off vacation days (or even take some myself!). It's the reaction of my remaining employee that's doing it.
She is a worrier, that's nothing new. But she inflates problems beyond proportion and no matter how much I assure her that we have support, and no matter how many times I tell her that actually she should do less than what she is doing to avoid burnout, it doesn't sink in. There's always thinking about every potential scenario of how things could go wrong.
I try not to say things like "this always happens..." or "she always does this..." because always and never are unhelpful extremes. But when I say she's "always thinking about every potential scenario of how things could go wrong", I really do mean "always". I can't imagine the mental toll she suffers, but I know that it affects those around her (it affects me!) to think and speak that way.
And I know that no matter how much I try I will never convince her to take a step back and be less "perfect", do less work1. Much of the work we do has arbitrary deadlines; we aim to complete certain work at certain times, but it's not absolutely necessary to work within those time frames. But years of ingrained practice with these timelines has created what I call "artificial" stress, because there's no reason we can't slow things down and collect ourselves. Instead we (well...my team) get worked up because we must transfer those logs at 1pm and be damned if we have to wait an extra 10 minutes because we're missing a piece of information.
I want to feel relaxed about this upcoming change. I do feel relaxed about the workload. But all this stress from everyone else - it's affecting me. I'm not writing as much. Or reading. I try to take leisure time at home where I can but everything feels busy at home too, always on the go with something.
I'll get through it - but it feels very unfair to have stress dumped on me from somebody else when I wouldn't be feeling it otherwise.
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Seriously. She logs in and works on her vacation days, and she logged in and worked when I had her take a sick day a few weeks ago. It's a sickness. She talks and talks about how she wants to get back into reading, but it's clear to me "work" is her hobby.↩