Things We All Pretend Are Normal at Work

By: Brittany Teepe

 

There are things we do at work that would sound completely bizarre if we described them to someone who had never had a job. We spend weeks preparing to tell people something they already know. We put our most complicated thoughts into rectangles on a screen and call it a presentation. We say we’re “touching base” as though our colleagues are distant relatives we occasionally encounter at the grocery store. We ask someone how they’re doing and then immediately follow it with a question about a deadline. And somehow, none of this seems particularly strange.

That’s the fascinating thing about work. Give a group of adults enough time together, and they will develop an entire collection of rituals that everyone follows without ever deciding to create them. Some are useful. Some are harmless. And some are worth asking about.

We Have Entire Conversations Without Saying the Thing We Mean

“I’d love to get your thoughts on something.” “There’s been some discussion around…” “I wonder if there’s an opportunity to…” “We may want to consider…”

Sometimes these phrases are simply good diplomacy. Other times, they are elaborate linguistic gymnastics designed to avoid saying, “This isn’t working,” “I disagree,” “You need to change something,” “I made a mistake,” or “We need to make a decision.”

Work has developed an impressive vocabulary for making difficult things sound pleasantly abstract. The problem isn’t politeness. It’s when politeness becomes so elaborate that nobody can tell what anyone is actually saying.

There is a difference between communicating thoughtfully and communicating so carefully that the actual message disappears.

We Treat “Busy” Like a Personality Trait

Ask someone how they’re doing at work, and “busy” is practically a reflex. Not good. Not bad. Not excited. Not overwhelmed. Busy.

Being busy has become one of the safest ways to communicate that we’re important without having to explain what we’re actually doing. And because everyone else is busy, we rarely stop to ask the more useful question: busy doing what?

There is a meaningful difference between a full calendar and intentional progress, yet we’ve become remarkably comfortable treating the two as synonyms. We can fill an entire day and still wonder at 5:30 where the day went.

Maybe being busy isn’t the problem. Maybe our habit of treating busyness as evidence of productivity is.

We Give Things Names Instead of Solving Them

This one happens constantly. Suddenly, something is a “communication issue,” a “bandwidth issue,” an “alignment opportunity,” a “leadership challenge,” or a “culture issue.” The label makes the problem sound understood.

But naming something isn’t the same as understanding it.

Sometimes, a beautifully phrased organizational problem is still just a problem sitting there waiting for someone to actually address it. “Communication issue” can mean anything from unclear expectations to two people who simply aren’t having a necessary conversation. “Culture issue” can mean everything from a broken process to behavior that leadership has been unwilling to confront.

A label can be useful. It can also become a convenient place to stop thinking.

We Reward the Person Who Can Always Find the Answer

Every workplace has someone who seems to know everything. Need a number from 2019? Ask them. Can’t figure out how the system works? Ask them. Don’t know why the process exists? They probably do. Need to know who actually makes a particular decision? Definitely ask them.

We tend to see this person as indispensable. And maybe they are. But there is another way to look at it.

If one person is the answer to every question, the organization may have accidentally created a dependency instead of building knowledge. Their expertise is valuable, but so is making sure that expertise doesn’t disappear the moment they take a vacation, change roles, or leave the organization altogether.

Being the person everyone needs can feel like recognition. Until you realize the organization can’t function without you.

We Celebrate “Firefighting” More Than Prevention

Someone stays late to solve a crisis, and everyone is impressed. Someone jumps in at the last minute and saves a project, and they’re a hero. But someone spends six months quietly fixing the process that keeps creating the crisis in the first place? Crickets.

There is something deeply satisfying about watching a problem get rescued. It is visible, dramatic, and easy to celebrate. Prevention is much less exciting. Nobody gathers around to applaud the crisis that never happened.

But organizations can accidentally teach people that being the hero is more valuable than making the hero unnecessary. When the same people are repeatedly rewarded for rescuing situations, we may overlook the opportunity to ask why those situations keep happening in the first place.

Sometimes the most valuable person in the room is the one who figured out how to keep the fire from starting.

We Keep Promoting the Version of Someone That Made Them Successful

Someone is fantastic at their job, so they get promoted. Then we give them responsibility for other people and are surprised when being excellent at the old job doesn’t automatically translate into being excellent at the new one.

It’s a strange assumption when you say it out loud. We wouldn’t promote someone from pilot to air-traffic controller simply because they were really good at flying planes. Yet organizations make versions of this leap all the time.

The skills that make someone exceptional in one role aren’t always the skills that make them effective in the next. A brilliant individual contributor may need to learn how to delegate. A highly decisive person may need to become a better listener. Someone who built their reputation by having all the answers may need to learn how to develop people who can find their own.

And somehow, we continue to act surprised by that.

We Confuse Familiar With Effective

Honestly, this might be the biggest one.

A process has existed for ten years, so it must work. A person has always handled something a certain way, so that must be the right way. A policy has been around forever, so changing it feels risky. But familiarity is not evidence. It only means we’ve had more time to get used to something.

Organizations rarely wake up one morning and decide to become inefficient, overly complicated, or resistant to change. More often, those things accumulate gradually. A workaround becomes a process. A temporary solution becomes policy. A habit becomes tradition. Eventually, no one remembers why something started, but everyone knows not to question it.

And perhaps that’s the strangest thing we normalize at work: we often mistake “nothing has gone wrong enough to force us to change” for “this is working.”

Maybe Normal Deserves a Second Look

None of this means workplaces should become perfectly optimized machines where every interaction has been streamlined, and every process has been analyzed to death. That sounds exhausting.

Workplaces are living, breathing things. They develop habits, personalities, shortcuts, and quirks along the way. Not all of them need fixing. But they are worth noticing. Culture has a funny way of turning repeated behavior into unquestioned behavior. Once something becomes normal, we stop asking whether it still makes sense.

So maybe the occasional question isn’t, “Is this normal?” Maybe it’s, “Why is this normal?”

Because those are very different questions.

And the second one can tell you a lot about the organization you’re in.