Bear favours you might be doing at work
There are a few things at work that seem like the right thing to do, but in fact will have unintended negative consequences on your work and your organisation. In Norwegian, we call this a “bjørnetjeneste” or bear favour. Some bear favours I’ve noticed are easy to do at work:
Always saying yes
Choosing work over your mental and physical health
Being constantly available
Promising a deadline you’re not confident in
Before going into them, let’s start with why it’s called bear favour. The term is from a fable called The Bear and the Gardener, and goes as follows:
A gardener, who lived alone, became discontented, and set out, one day, to seek a friend who would be a suitable companion. He had not gone far when he met a Bear, whom he invited to come and live with him. The Bear was a very silly one, who was also discontented with living alone, so he went home with the gardener very willingly.
The gardener provided all the food, and the only service he required of the Bear was to keep the flies off his face while he slept in the shade. One day, a fly insisted upon lighting on the Gardener's face, although he was brushed off again and again. The silly Bear finally became so enraged that he threw a heavy stone upon it. He killed the fly, but alas! he also killed his friend.
In true fable fashion, that’s surprisingly morbid. Apparently, the intended moral of the story is that it’s better to have no friends than a foolish one. However, it’s since inspired the useful term bear favour, which means doing a service for someone that ends up being a disservice to them. Like a clumsy and big bear trying to help their friend. In a work setting, bear favours are actions you’re doing because you think it benefits your job, but that can ultimately lead to negative consequences.
1. Always saying yes
Saying yes whenever your manager asks you to do something can easily feel like the right thing to do. Surely they’ll know what’s most important and will think more highly of you if you say yes. However, that’s not always the case, and sometimes they’re more like the gardener in the fable: Asking the bear to brush off flies, when there are probably more and better uses for the bear’s strength and claws that the garden is missing out on.
There are particularly two disservices you can end up doing to your organisation by always saying yes:
Taking on too many tasks, and not being able to finish them properly and at all.
Not developing enough professionally, being stuck in the same type of role, and ultimately providing less value for your organisation.
While being open to new opportunities and responsibilities at work is important, managing your time well and knowing when you’re at capacity is vital. If you’re always saying yes without actually having room for the new task, you can end up doing a mediocre or poor job, or even not completing all of your task. By sometimes saying no, you’re actually letting your manager know that they can trust that if you say yes, you’ll do a good job and your other responsibilities won’t fall through the cracks.
Sometimes, always saying yes can even stop you from getting responsibilities that give you the opportunity to learn new skills. If the tasks your manager give you are of the same type and size every time, you run the risk of not growing and limiting yourself in the type of tasks and responsibilities you can have. This is a disservice to your manager and organisation, as they’re missing out on an employee that can do a larger set of tasks and have more responsibility.
Ideally, this is something your manager is aware of and try to give space to grow. However, they might not know the breadth of things you’re interested in developing in, and they just might be putting you in a smaller box than they should be. In my case, I’ve had to demonstrate that I can be given more responsibility at work by saying no and rather work with my manager to find others we can delegate to. Eventually, we found someone new to take over my role, which resulted in me getting more responsibility and ultimately the position I have today. This also means saying no to a new project at the expense of spending more time on professional development. While saying no comes at a cost, it can ultimately result in you doing even more valuable work because your manager can delegate bigger responsibilities (or balls) to you.
2. Choosing work over your mental and physical health
Hopefully, this one sounds very obvious. Your mental and physical health is always more important than your work1. But it’s not always easy to realise when you’re prioritising work over your mental and physical health.
I’m a morning person, and am at my most productive and decisive in the mornings. Therefore, I used to start work pretty much straight after I woke up. I would tell myself that I could do journaling, exercise, or go for a walk in the afternoon, or after work. I also have the most willpower in the mornings, however, and often don’t have much left in the afternoons. So sitting down to journal in the afternoon or going for a walk after work would require a lot of energy, and I often end up watching a TV series or TikTok instead.
While it seemed like I wasn’t prioritising work, I was choosing to spend the time I have the most self-discipline on work rather than my own mental and physical health. About six months ago, I made the choice to have at least an hour between waking up and starting working where I do something nice for myself. Now, I spend most mornings doing things I enjoy, like taking time to do a multi-step skincare routine, followed by a walk or journaling, often while listening to an audiobook or an album I like.
This does mean I’m not spending my most productive time at work. But it also means I’m taking better care of myself by doing things that feel good, that I enjoy, and making sure I eat and drink water. This has overall increased my happiness and focus at work throughout the day. That’s both good in and of itself, but it’s also good for my overall productivity and contribution at work. In other words, by investing in myself in the morning, even though I’m spending my most valuable hours, I’m getting even higher returns on investment at work because of it.
The point here isn’t that you always need to spend your most productive time doing skincare, journaling, and listening to an audiobook (though I highly recommend it). Rather, the point is that if you prioritise your best self and most of your energy on work, you are in fact choosing work over your own mental and physical health, which in turn can have a negative impact on your long-term work performance.
3. Being constantly available at work
Slack and email can be addictive in the same way Instagram and Twitter are: You refresh your inbox, and get a rush when a new message appears. If you’re like me, this is particularly the case in my first few months at a new job or project. Everything feels exciting and new, and I catch myself checking slack and email as the first thing I do when I wake up and the last thing I do before going to bed.
To me, the need to be constantly available is also driven by a worry that I might miss something important. This isn’t helped by the fact that I do sometimes get emails or slack messages in my job that are actually urgent.
How is being constantly available at work a disservice to you and your workplace? First of all, if you’re like most people, you need time to be completely off work. Being on alert and always ready to respond is important if there’s a crisis (and to be clear, this advice is for normal times, not for crises), but it’s too costly at any other time. It can cause stress and be mentally taxing, at a time that you’re supposed to be spending on yourself and other non-work stuff. Essentially, you might be inadvertently choosing work over your own well-being. As if you were working over-time, being constantly available can make you less productive overall.
Second, always being available and attentive, can increase the stress and tension of the people around you. People notice when you’re very responsive or working outside of office hours. Just like always being on call can make it feel like you’re in crisis mode, it also signals to others that there’s a crisis and they also need to be alert. It can make something that’s actually a normal situation into a stressful one.
Lastly, checking or responding to messages in the evenings increases the chances of you i) forgetting the message the next day when you’re at work and should be responding, and ii) giving a worse answer, making a mistake, or using a stone to brush off flies if you choose to respond immediately.
If you actually need to be constantly available, I recommend setting up reliable ways people can reach you if it actually is urgent and important. In our team, we use Slack for non-urgent things and during work hours, and text messages if there’s anything particularly urgent that we need to deal with outside of work hours. When I go on holiday, I give people that might need me urgently my phone number, and temporarily delete Slack and Superhuman, the email app I use, from my phone.
4. Promising a deadline you’re not confident in
The last bear favour is something I still do a lot of, and am currently working on. If you’ve ever emailed me, there’s a chance I’ve been slow at responding, have given you a time estimate for when you can expect to hear from me, and then you’ve had to follow up with me because I didn’t meet the deadline I set for myself. I’m pretty good at triaging and dealing with other people’s inboxes, but my own inbox is an entirely different thing2.
This happens most often with people who have already waited some days or weeks for a response. When I say I’ll get back to someone by end of day, or early next week, I’m giving people relief and hope that I’ll be responding to them soon. Surely that must feel better than to not hear anything. Instead, what they often end up receiving are false expectations and inaccurate information.
I really do think I’ll get back to them by the deadline I set. However, I often end up not meeting the deadline because there are other things I’m doing that have higher priority, and in fact the email isn’t very important or maybe not even urgent. Emails are particularly ughy for me, and I sometimes will just postpone the email unnecessarily too.
There are two reasons why I think this is important, and why I’m prioritising improving on this at the moment: i) Not making my own deadlines makes me feel guilty and sad, and raises the threshold for responding, and ii) I’m pretty sure it makes people trust me less, or that I’m in other ways using up parts of the social capital I have with them unnecessarily.
Instead of giving a wishful deadline, I’m now trying to either not give a deadline at all, or take the deadline I want to give and tell them 2 or 3 times that. For example, if I think it’ll take me 1-2 days, I’ll say a week. Most of the time, I just don’t need to tell people when I’ll get back to them. And if I feel like I need to, it’s better to pleasantly surprise them by responding earlier than expected.
This isn’t always accurate, but I think we should act as if it is. Sometimes you have a big deadline at work, and choosing to work an extra hour instead of going to gym might be the right thing to do. Those times are the exception to the rule, however, and as with most rules you should be very certain before you break it.
This is why I tell people that you don’t need to be very organised in your own life to be a good assistant or good at operations, you can instead be great at organising other people’s lives. The example I most often use is that when I grew up I loved cleaning my sister’s room, but I absolutely hated cleaning my own.