Empathy at work.

There's been a lot of buzz on the NYT piece on the difficult workplace culture at Amazon's corporate offices.  I have a lot of thoughts on it, but just wanted to write about the one anecdote in the piece that really surprised me -- the one about a woman who came back to work after her child was stillborn.

It wasn't her experience that surprised me; it was the fact that her story was there at all.  If you hardly ever hear about stillbirth, period, forget hearing about the experience of going back to work after a stillbirth.  In a 6,000 word article, there were only four sentences about it, but that was enough to rattle me.  It hit way too close to home.  (I wrote about my experience here and here.)

A former human resources executive said she was required to put a woman who had recently returned after undergoing serious surgery, and another who had just had a stillborn child, on performance improvement plans, accounts that were corroborated by a co-worker still at Amazon. “What kind of company do we want to be?” the executive recalled asking her bosses. 

The mother of the stillborn child soon left Amazon. “I had just experienced the most devastating event in my life,” the woman recalled via email, only to be told her performance would be monitored “to make sure my focus stayed on my job.”

I don't spend much time thinking about how alienated and unsupported and ultimately fucked over I felt after I went back to work, but when I do, I still get so angry about it.  There was just a total lack of empathy from my leadership.  I could feel that they just felt super awkward about it and hoped that I would just get back to behaving and performing normally as soon as possible, even under circumstances that were difficult (not just personally but professionally).  And when I still wasn't totally normal, less than three months after returning, the response wasn't, hey, you understandably must be having a hard time coping with your grief; it was more like, hey, you aren't performing up to your usual standard, what's wrong with you?

How are you supposed to come back from something like that?  You can't, and you don't even want to -- between your actual loss and the lack of support from your workplace, it doesn't even seem worth the fight.  It takes a long time to recover from losing someone you love, and yet I was expected to take less than a quarter.  When I look back on that time, I can't believe I was able to do even what little I did.  That time felt so, so meager.