By Heidi Elkholy

2020 was a batshit year. Like countless others, I was made redundant from my marketing job. My sister, Halah, who is a creative, had her full-time hours reduced to a three-day working week with no explanation and no plans to review this arrangement in the future, despite the company that she was working for performing better than ever during the pandemic. Needless to say, things were looking a bit grim.

Fast-forward six months. Halah and I had been applying our restless energy into helping friends develop the seeds of ideas that came to them over lockdown; the ‘what if we did this?’, the ‘what the world needs right now is’, and the ‘why has nobody thought to do this?’. These were personal projects that, before the world ground to a standstill, our friends had previously never been allowed the time to explore. As super-tight sisters (co-dependent? Us?), we discovered that we worked well together. Our friends loved that we understood their ideas, and the branding that we came up with was well-received by them all. Things looked promising. For the first time ever, we started to see our potential away from a corporate structure. What if we could go into business for ourselves?

The main driving force behind starting our own business, above the flexible working hours and the creative autonomy, was that we would never have to shrink ourselves for a Managing Director’s ego again. We could finally escape the pitfalls of toxic work environments, something we both have a lot of experience with. 

After working unpaid internships and zero-hour contract jobs in which misogyny and casual racism were part and parcel of a corporate environment, Halah and I started to work for independent small businesses. We were tired; the notion of assimilation for an easier ride is nothing new to people of colour, especially women, but it is important to stress that in being silent and going against your beliefs, you slowly internalise the racism and sexism directed at you and can begin to exhibit the same ignorance that is perpetuated by the toxic workplace. It’s an ugly road to go down and, sadly, one that is often necessary for women of colour to travel in order to further – or even just to hold on to – our careers. 

Working for small businesses seemed like an obvious solution to us, as we naturally assumed these would be a more inclusive and progressive environment. I found a role where there would be access to and the support of a ‘hands-on’ Managing Director and a small, close-knit team, described as a ‘family’ in the job description. Surely a company that has a pool table and a zany HR ‘mascot’ in the lobby and offers perks like staff breakfasts, beers on Friday, and weekly yoga classes in the name of mindfulness must really care about the well-being of their employees?

Spoiler alert. A company that uses hot pink as their main brand colour to ‘shake things up’, does not a fun workplace make. The promise of beers at 4 pm on a Friday became a necessary prop as I worked well into the weekends at the cost of any semblance of a work/life balance. Yoga classes were scrapped because people were working overtime and were just too tired to turn up. And woe betide you if you stepped anywhere near the pool table! 

I worked in one of those small, ‘KERAYZEE’ agencies for nearly two years before I was called into a disciplinary hearing, which was tacked on to the end of the day with no prior warning. The account that I was managing was doing really well and there was no cause for complaint, so I was very confused. My disciplinary meeting was conducted by the director of Sales, a man that I’d clashed with previously over his creepy sexist comments and yellow-face ‘banter’ in the office. What transpired as the meeting went on was that the MD had called for me to be sacked, following a particularly volatile and abusive period in which he would demoralise my team before big pitches, call us on our way there and back to scream at us and berate us, and then bombard us with saccharine emails and cry on cue to show how sorry he was afterwards. This cycle was exhausting. When he invited open and honest communication ‘in order to move forward positively’, I called him out on his abusive behaviour and sealed my fate by using my voice. The fear of something like this ruining the prospect of any future work was very real. But the relief in leaving was overwhelming.

Of course, symptoms of a toxic workplace can be much more covert. Arguably, it is most sinister when it benefits the company’s image and is spun as a performative exercise in inclusion and diversity. A friend of mine said that she was flattered when she was pulled to the front in her workplace’s photoshoot, with the pictures taken to be used for promo material and social media. It was only later on that she noticed that everyone else was being repositioned, almost framing her, which made her feel Othered. Another instance of covert racism happened while I was working at a different family-run agency – this story involves condiments, of all things. I’d brought in a bottle of hot sauce, which myself and a colleague opened on a Friday afternoon to have with our lunch. The following Monday, we both happened to call in sick (I was hungover, to be honest, but said I had a migraine. My colleague said he had the flu). The Managing Director’s brother and another director saw fit to decant my near-full bottle of hot sauce down the toilet, insisting that this was the reason for our being sick over the whole weekend and into the following Monday, despite us both stating why we were off. They sheepishly told me what they’d done when I went in on Tuesday but stressed that they’d only done it ‘so no one else would be harmed’ by this foreign sauce. It didn’t occur to them that: 

1. While the label has a Bajan woman on it, the sauce was bought from Sainsbury’s.

2. More importantly, a question of entitlement and self-control: why is anyone helping themselves to my hot sauce if they can’t handle spice?
   

I was mortified, and the incident was awkwardly laughed off, but this happening within a month of my employment at that agency only served to divide me from the rest of the workforce (which was all white). 

Meanwhile, my sister was deep in a toxic workplace of her own: another small, family-run company. In the four years that she was there, she came to learn that their alarmingly high staff turnover rate was due to the founders having cultivated an environment so toxic it had driven many people to leave. Mental health was neither acknowledged nor supported; people were regularly crying in the open-plan office, which was never addressed. The company have been known to gaslight and dehumanise ‘difficult’ staff who sought support and have been said to refer to them as ‘spots’: not to be fired, but instead ‘squeezed’ to quit. It’s no surprise that a common joke in small businesses is, ‘What HR department?’ When the office culture is one that boasts ‘We’re not PC, we’re risqué and we won’t change!’, it’s easy to feel helpless. The ironic thing is that those appointed HR in small businesses are usually the ones against whom the grievance would be filed. 

A very questionable disciplinary hearing was set up against Halah for daring to try to find other means of work in order to top-up her depleted income. This was particularly baffling in the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic and the subsequent rise of the ‘side-hustle’. It seemed almost too much like a set-up. The outcome of this disciplinary hearing was that the company would have complete control over what my sister did outside of working hours, whether it was a creative side-project or volunteer work. People have left jobs for a lot less than this draconian ownership of their staff and, after hearing the outcome of the disciplinary hearing, Halah promptly handed in her notice of resignation.

So, there we were, both out of work. As employees of small businesses, the pressure to not let your ‘family’ down led both of us to burnout. Any tricky conversations about asking for extra support with an intense workload, a pay-rise to match the increase in responsibility, or even flexible working hours so that some life outside of work was possible would give way to an indignant ‘after all we’ve done for you?! We MADE you!’ 

The less a company outwardly values your work, the less you are encouraged to value yourself – and they knowingly perpetuate this cycle of exploitation. So, you stay. You work unpaid overtime because you’re ‘lucky to have this job’ and are so stressed that you can’t dedicate any time to thinking about how your skills are truly your own and no one else’s. As creatives, the last year has given us all a chance to take stock of our talents as our own best assets. We all can be confident in going it alone, giving the biggest and most satisfying middle-finger to our ex-bosses with this massive act of self-love that is finally investing in ourselves.

Halah and I made the leap and started Salt and Sister Studio, an independent creative design and branding studio. Our view is for it to grow and become a female creative collective in Manchester, working collaboratively and supportively with other creatives leaving – or being forced out of – their toxic workplaces. The studio was started as a response to archaic set-ups (even the ones that have a mini-fridge for beers), and we are so excited to see how we grow as creatives, finally unhindered and unrestricted.

Find our work here: Salt And Sister Studio