The dancer, the guilt trip, and the rainy day
Recently, I was chatting with my new friend R about her previous work as a professional dancer.
As with all jobs, there were good things and bad. I could see how much R loved – and still loves – dancing. But being able to do something she loved came with costs, too.
There were costs I had expected, like dance being an environment where your physical appearance is under a lot of scrutiny. Sometimes that was for reasons that made sense, like whether R was moving in time with her colleagues. Often it was wildly unnecessary societal nonsense about body shape with the dial turned up to 11.
There were also costs I hadn't known about. One was job insecurity. There's a lot of this in dance, it turns out. You're usually working on short contracts and you don't often know where your next job will be. (These aspects of R’s time as a dancer were, funnily enough, near-perfect echoes of my own experiences as an early-career academic. )
And then there was what happened if someone was unexpectedly off work.
In many of R's roles, there was no-one to step into the place of a dancer who had the flu or a family emergency. If that happened, the remaining dancers had to reconfigure what they were doing entirely. At first I didn't grasp why, and then R explained that one missing person throws everything off-kilter: the way the dance looks, the partner work, the storytelling. If you're still struggling understand the impact, imagine trying to stage the Rocky Horror with a blank space where Riff Raff should be. Without someone to take Richard O’Brien's place, The Time Warp just… wouldn't work. You'd have to figure out a different way to tell the same story.
“Wait,” I said when R told me this, “isn't that what understudies do? Fill in the gaps?”
Which is how I learned that some dance companies don’t have understudies. Maybe they can't afford to pay extra dancers to learn the roles and hang around during performances in case someone's injured midway through Act I. Maybe they could afford it but choose to spend the money elsewhere.
Which is fair enough.
Just kidding.
Let's play spot the consequence.
Consequence 1: R felt guilty about taking sick leave because she knew it would mean extra work for everyone else.
Consequence 2: R had to weigh up whether taking sick leave would be strike against her chances of a contract being renewed.
Consequence 3: R had to consider whether she could afford to pay the bills, because most dance jobs don’t come with sick pay.
Consequence 4: R came into work unless there was absolutely no other option. Even when she was really ill. Even when she was injured.
Notice who had to deal with all those consequences? Yeah.
Most of my jobs have come with paid sick leave attached, so I was lucky enough not to have to worry about paying the bills if I was ill. I still felt guilty about letting my colleagues down.
The specifics of the guilt trips I gave myself were different, of course. I can’t take sick leave because my students won’t have anyone to teach them. I can't take sick leave because it will screw up this event my colleagues have spent ages planning. I can't take sick leave because I am the only person in the entire organisation who understands how this thing works and my absence will cause multiple overlapping delays.
Are you thinking, ‘I feel guilty when I take sick leave. I come into work when I don't feel well. Isn't it normal?’
No, it isn't normal. But it is normalised.
Arguably, guilt is one of the characteristics of the ‘ideal worker’. There are some positives to guilt – for example, it can prevent people from freeloading on others. But the negatives are enormous.
I think this sentence from Camille Allard and Grace Whitfield’s research on guilt at work says it all: “Workers who feel guilty—who are susceptible to “emotional blackmail”—become malleable, hardworking, and unlikely to push for additional support or workplace improvements.”
What, and I mean this with all my heart, the absolute fuck.
We deserve much, much better than that from our employers.
You know, things like being able to trust our employers to maintain a balance between staffing levels and organisational activity that doesn’t leave employees feeling guilty for taking sick leave.
I often hear people talking about understaffing as though it’s a moderately annoying natural phenomenon which none of us have any control over. As though it’s rain.
This makes sense on one level. The reasons behind understaffing are often like the reasons behind rain: multiple, complex, hard to predict, hard to control. Things like sudden extra demand for your goods or services, needing to cut costs, or not being able to find someone with the skills to fill a vacancy.
So far, so good. Let's take it further. Let's get literal.
Imagine you’re a senior executive of a company that organises outdoor events. It has unexpectedly started raining as you’re setting up, and some of your equipment can’t get wet.
What do you do?
If the rain is only going to last a few minutes, maybe you send out several employees to stand over things with umbrellas. They return to setting up once the rain has stopped. Not really a problem.
If it’s going to rain the whole day, it’s probably immediately obvious to you that this response no longer makes sense. There are all sorts of drawbacks. Employees already have tasks they’re supposed to be doing. Their attention is now divided between those tasks and the new one you’ve given them, and they’re having to do their tasks one-handed while standing over the equipment they need to shelter. Many will get annoyed. Some will start mentally composing their resignation letters.
It’s probably also immediately obvious that there are a lot of other options for dealing with an entire day of rain. Maybe you downsize the event so it can fit inside a marquee. Maybe you cancel the event and make plans to buy waterproofed equipment. Maybe you see if you can hire a few umbrella holders for the day.
What you do not do is ask your existing employees to spend the whole day juggling all the tasks they already do with all the extra tasks created by the rain.
It is not okay for an organisation to dump the consequences of prolonged understaffing onto the people with the least power to change the situation.
Especially when most of the time it's entirely feasible to set smaller goals or reassess priorities or hire some outside support.
If you’re still feeling guilty about taking sick leave, consider this: that way lies burnout.
I don't say that to burden you with the responsibility for burnout. Burnout is not an individual issue, though we often talk about it that way. Burnout is a result of poor organisational design.
In one job, I was a single point of failure in the processes of over a dozen teams. There was no-one else in the organisation who did what I did. The colleague whose knowledge and skills most closely overlapped with mine could do perhaps 20% of my work, and I could do about 20% of hers.
It was sustainable for a while. And then something happened, and I got ill.
I resisted taking sick leave for quite a while, because every time I thought about it I ended up in the same dead end: ‘If I take sick leave then there'll be a deluge when I get back, so I will save my future self the trouble and just keep going. I’ll be fine.’
(I was not fine. I was, eventually, very ill indeed. It took me a long while to recover fully. And I am… different, now, in good ways and bad.)
I know - boy, do I know - that a situation like that seems like an impossible nightmare maze when you're in it. And I am lucky enough to have people in my life who willingly came into the maze to find me and tried to help me locate a way out.
Even so, it took a while for me to believe there was a way out. My friends and my partner kept coming into the maze, kept finding me standing in the same dead end, still trying to punch my way through the wall with my bare fists. For over a year.
Eventually they convinced me to turn around and it turned out the exit had been right behind me all along. There was a neon sign on it and everything.
This is what the sign said:
You do not have to take individual responsibility for, compensate for, or otherwise shield a broken organisation from its systemic failings, especially not at the at the expense of your own health.
You need sick leave? Take sick leave.
(I wish I lived in a world where I didn’t have to caveat that last sentence, but here we are: this is assuming that taking sick leave will not cause you serious financial strain or otherwise put you at risk – and I am so sorry if you’re up against that kind of barrier.)
Shout out to organisational psychologist Nancy Cater for some very helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this post. If you’d like to get even more annoyed about Western work culture, I recommend her awesome podcast The Problem With Work, in which she and art curator/cultural researcher Benedetta Castrioto talk about where the Western concept of work came from, what it means for how (and when, and where, and why) we work now, and how work might look different in the future.