HBR: Call In Black

If you can’t turn to Harvard Business Review for “management wisdom,” where else can a CEO turn? And HBR delivers, even if the message may not turn out the way the brilliant minds there assume it will. First, the corporate dilemma.

Black employees are exhausted. Over the past year, their cognitive, emotional, and physical resources have been disproportionally depleted due to two deadly and intertwined pandemics: Covid-19 and structural racism. Black people are more likely to lose their jobs and be hospitalized or die from Covid-19, while still facing disproportionate threats of brutalization and death from policing compared to white people.

Additional factors exacerbate these experiences. First, assaults against Black people were major news stories in 2020, broadcasted regularly across all types of media. This is what’s known as a racial mega-threat — a negative, large-scale, race-related event that receives significant media attention — which heightens racial trauma. Research shows that this type of ongoing experience creates psychological racial battle fatigue — a natural depletion response to commonplace, consistent experiences of heightened distress due to racism.

But that’s not all.

Second, Black employees and leaders are also often asked to educate non-Black individuals about racism and, in many cases, to lead the antiracism charge in their organizations. Responding to such requests and/or fulfilling them requires both physical and emotional labor, which can heighten existing fatigue. All of this is being added to the weight of ongoing disparities in the workplace, including pay inequality and lack of representation in leadership.

Who wouldn’t be exhausted? Now the HBR solutions.

It may seem counterintuitive to rest when there is so much work needed for meaningful change. Yet, consistently disengaging from work can facilitate recovery, as rest is critical for resilience to adversity. This includes taking time off from work when needed to prioritize mental health and well-being. For example, we theorize that employees may need to “call in Black” instead of showing up to work when racially traumatic events occur, especially for those who work in organizations lacking resources to support their coping process. Employers can offer paid time off in a way that is specifically intended to support Black employees.

Quality sleep is critical for recovery, too. Several individuals, groups, and organizations such as The Nap Ministry are exploring how people can experience rest as resistance to and liberation from systemic racism. Naps also help to boost mood, alertness, and performance. Thus, rest is a useful tool for organizations to offer and support for Black employees’ recovery.

There are other fixes, such as entitling black employees to “just say no” when they don’t want to shoulder the exhausting burdens of blackness in the workplace. They also urge employers to create black healing spaces, segregated from other races, and promoting “comfort and esteem for Black identities” so black people aren’t expected, no required, to behave like white folks.

Over the past year, many organizations have stated that they value Black lives. One important way of showing this is to value Black recovery and tangibly support Black resilience.

If this were true, that black employees are so weak, emotionally stunted and sleepy that they are incapable of functioning as employees at all, no less viable employees, why would anyone hire a black person? Neither people nor businesses value black people because they’re less able to perform their job than white, Hispanic, Asian or Aleut employees, but because they are just as good, if not better, than any other employee. Advice like this is the last thing black people need to achieve success in the workplace.

Fortunately, it’s not true and this is the most ridiculous, offensive and racist advice possible. Yet, there it is, in Harvard Business Review.