My employee engagement survey has “I can be my authentic self at work.” Honey, I work in a client-facing role, often federal clients, often presidentially appointed ones.
We don’t do so well on that one.
Many jobs, paid or volunteer, are performative. Some much more than others. Not everyone is capable of working every job. I know I’m not.
The people who answer “no” to that question are the closest to be their authentic selves.
I suspect some of the yeses authentically enjoy synergizing the paradigm.
God, I fucking hate that question. I don’t go to work in order to find a place where I can express myself authentically. I go to work so that I can feed my family, save money for the future, and buy nice things. You want me to be more satisfied and engaged as an employee, pay me more.
Same goes for survey questions about whether I find my work “meaningful”. You wanna know how my work can be meaningful? If it gives me the funds, security, and time off to go and do meaningful stuff in my own time.
It’s like they want to make it seem like working at the job isn’t transactional, but damn, it IS transactional. I care much more about the quality of the transaction than whatever fluff you want to wrap it up in.
I don’t even know what my “authentic self” is. Maybe that just means I’m privileged enough not to have to constantly “fake it”; maybe it means the term is stupid bullshit. I dunno.
I mean, I do find my work meaningful. That doesn’t mean that if I won the lottery I wouldn’t retire early. Someone else can find the work meaningful then.
Yeah… As long as it’s not an on camera meeting.
I do too, to an extent. But it’s not at all what motivates me to do my job. And if a far less meaningful job offered me a big enough pay bump, I’d take it in a heartbeat.
If y’all had read my cites, you’d have seen that a lot of PoC in the non-profit sector don’t do it for the paycheck. It’s a vocation for a lot of them. I mean, they’d like to be paid well to do it[1] , but largely so they wouldn’t have to do side hustles and second jobs to keep doing what they do. And also because that would be fair.
If they won the lottery, most of them would use the money to keep doing what they’re doing, I bet.
or failing that, at least paid as well as their White colleagues ↩︎
I do to some degree mask, in that I filter out things that would be disadvantageous to reveal in a particular situation. But that doesn’t mean I say things I don’t mean or believe. In what I do say, I am authentic.
I will thank people. I will focus on the positives and not the negatives. But I won’t debase myself. I won’t adhere to any idea that I am lesser than the other person.
And that is, at least in part, what I suspect the POC issue could be. They should not have to pretend to be lesser because that makes a donor feel better, not having their subconscious unchecked racism challenged.
And I suspect that white people may wind up asking POCs to do without realizing it, because they themselves don’t have to worry about that.