The dialect of corporate America can seem vaguely indecipherable, where the words spoken aren’t necessarily the words meant and sentences must be decoded for hidden subtext.
Successive HR training programmes and employee manuals have led to a sort of erasure of personality at work, where employees find themselves speaking in templated formats.
Political correctness is taken to an extreme, where even in casual conversations, you need to be as careful as a lawyer filing a legal notice.
A work culture that demands performative inclusivity and marketable authenticity has made Silicon Valley’s technology giants a huge challenge to navigate.
While respect for different cultures, communities and genders is valuable in any workplace, the narrow, tight boundaries within which people are allowed to express themselves results in the “shredding of any form of humanity and authenticity”, as one employee put it.
The concern feels less about inclusion and more about ensuring the company doesn’t get sued.
As people are discouraged from bringing their full range of emotions to work, passive aggression replaces plainspeak. This is particularly true of big tech companies with bloated bureaucracies. Startups & smaller companies don’t have the money to lose on indirect communication.
While some have experienced toxic workplaces in India, they were better able to interpret social cues in an environment where people brought all their emotions to work – anger, sadness, frustration, joy.
After perplexing conversations at work, an Indian woman in big tech turns to a WhatsApp group of Indian friends in Silicon Valley to help her interpret what was said.
“First, you’ve got to hear what someone is saying at face value. Then you’ve got to understand what they’re actually trying to tell you. After that, you need to formulate a response and eventually frame your response in appropriate language without changing the tone,” she says.
While navigating a new culture, several Indians speak of the acute need to make meaningful connections with other human beings. What they get, instead, is extreme friendliness and copious amounts of small talk – devoid of intimacy.
Companies talk of the need for authenticity & vulnerability at the workplace. But the vulnerability on display seems performative. Managers share “vulnerable” moments of their lives in curated fashion as the opening act of team meetings, in a theatrical display of authenticity.