The rhetoric around the idea of the ideal worker creates an extremely demanding work environment and expectations that the average worker struggle to meet. The pandemic is changing work environments all over the world, and the needs of employers and employees are evolving.
RQ: How is the rhetoric of the ideal worker changing due to the pandemic?
Meisenbach and Feldner uncover the ideas of the ideal worker and what exactly that narrative pushes. The expectations pushed by this narrative, according to Meisenbach and Feldner, create an environment where employees feel forced to be available at all times, overly qualified, and a have a life that revolves solely around their job (Meisenbach & Feldner, 2019). They focus on the rhetoric of the show “Undercover Boss’ and how popular television plays a roll into the unreasonable demands surrounding the expectations of workers.
The popular press article from Harvard Business Review focuses on the faults of this idea discussed in the previous journal; however, rather than focusing on how the expectation of the ideal worker affects the worker it focuses on how the pandemic has challenged these expectations. With the average time an employee must work increasing, now that many are working at home, workers are beginning to feel suffocated; moreover, many are quitting their jobs because the demands of a rapidly changing family life mixed with the new demands of work life that are becoming too much to handle (Williams , 2021).
The concept of the ideal worker has put extremely detrimental set of expectations on the working class, and the pressure of this ideal often leads to unhealthy work environments. The notion that workers must be available to bend over backwards for their employer in order to be perceived as a good worker. This topic is important to examine, now more than ever, because the pandemic is changing how businesses are organizing, collaborating, and functioning as a whole. The focus of this paper will be the relationship between the ideal worker and the ideal boss, because both have very different connotations to them. This intention behind this research will be to understand what makes the relationship between a boss and an employee truly ideal during the current pandemic, and how the pandemic has forced employers to change the expectations they place on their employees.
The rhetoric around the ideal worker is an unhealthy, and is pushed in many different types of work environments. I’ve realized that this idea has been spun to make employees that reach it look like heroes, as mentioned in Meisenbach and Feldner’s article. The expectations created by this idea create an extremely toxic work life, and ruin the idea of a work AND life balance. From the research I’ve done just with these two articles, it is clear that the ideals that were once pushed are changing, and being challenged. People are no longer willing, or able, to put their careers ahead of their health and the health of their families. The typically work environment is changing, and with it so are the expectations on employees; however, I have yet to discover if that change is positive or negative. I hope to identify the changing relationship between the concept of the ideal worker and the pandemic.
References
Meisenbach, R. J., & Feldner, S. B. (2019). Constructing the Ideal Worker Identity: The Rhetorical Construction of Discursive Resources in Undercover Boss. Western Journal of Communication, 83(4), 403–422. https://doi.org/10.1080/10570314.2019.1566564
Williams , J. c. (2021, February 1). The Pandemic Has Exposed the Fallacy of the "Ideal Worker". Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2020/05/the-pandemic-has-exposed-the-fallacy-of-the-ideal-worker.