Fetch coffee, file expense reports, take the night shift – entry-level workers are expected to do the grunt work. But is there a point to this professional hazing?

When Caitlin, a 24-year-old in Pennsylvania, US, graduated from her nursing program about a year ago, she was assigned to the night shift.

“Most new nurses are sent into the night shift, which some people love,” she says. “For me it just wrecked my body and my life. I went into a terrible depression. I’m a super extroverted, daytime, sunshine person. It totally messed up my eating habits, my hormones, everything.”

Caitlin, who is withholding her surname for job security, says her circadian rhythm was so thrown off, she became unable to drive herself home after a shift without falling asleep. “Once,” she says, “I woke up in the opposite lane, a half-second from a head-on collision.” 

She approached her superiors and human resources to try to get her hours changed, to no avail. “The way you get to day shift is a seniority list based on when you started,” says Caitlin. “In order for me to get a full-time day shift position, I had to basically wait for people to quit, retire or leave. At the time, there was a day-shift position available, but they wouldn’t give it to me because there was someone who’d been there longer than me. It was a tough lesson: they weren’t going to let me skip the line.”

Ultimately, says Caitlin, she wasn’t shocked by that outcome. As one of the newest nurses on staff, she knew she was expected to work those overnight hours, no matter how tough it was. “You’ve got to just pay your dues,” she says. “I was kind of taught that is how life works. You’re at the bottom until you work your way up to the top.”

That’s generally the accepted narrative in the working world: everybody has to start somewhere – and that somewhere is often not glamourous. Across industries, it’s expected that those on the lowest rung of the ladder will take on the grunt work, be assigned the least-desirable shifts or do the time-consuming tasks more senior employees don’t want. Do those things, and the assumption is that you’ll eventually be initiated as a member of the team, prove you’re worthy of better or more enjoyable work and move out of that rookie role.

Hazing is saying, ‘you have to do this to be one of us, to be part of our group’. It’s paying the cost of entry – Benjamin J Thomas

“There are formal elements that indicate someone is ‘in.’ You have a signed contract, and you get a pay cheque,” says Benjamin J Thomas, an assistant professor of management and organisational studies at Radford University and the University of Louisville, US. “But then there are more invisible forces. These expectations are unspoken. They’re not in any handbook.”

But while the culture of ‘paying your dues’ – and even being hazed by elder staff along the way – may be ubiquitous, it may not necessarily be the best way to bring new staff into the fold. This approach to entering a group’s ranks may be human nature to some extent, but it also may tip work cultures from taxing to toxic.

The ‘human nature’ of hazing

For rookie workers, taking on the lowest-level – sometimes seemingly demeaning work – can sometimes feel like hazing, rather than skill building. That’s not entirely incorrect, says Thomas. In a way, younger workers are getting hazed – but not in the egregious, secret-society ways we often associate with hazing. “We hear the word and think it’s toxic, bad, degrading,” he says. 

Really, he explains, hazing just refers to those invisible expectations that are created for people who want to join an established group, whether it’s cultural, societal or professional. In other words, it’s just another term for paying your dues. “Hazing is saying, ‘you have to do this to be one of us, to be part of our group’. It’s paying the cost of entry.” 

Importantly, the idea that entry-level workers are expected to perform the least desirable tasks extends far past the workplace. “It’s not a new phenomenon, or one tied just to work. Pre-industrial societies haze each other. It seems to just be a human thing. To become an adult in many cultures, you have to go through some kind of ordeal, and that’s a form of hazing. Humans just do this to each other.”

Still, in the modern working world, it’s especially widespread. As many as 75% of American employees report having witnessed or participated in hazing, or say they’ve been on the receiving end.

Lower-level workers are tasked with grunt work, like doing the daily coffee run for the office higher-ups (Credit: Getty Images)

“Most people who do the hazing were themselves hazed,” says Thomas, “so they’re just sort of carrying on tradition for tradition’s sake. And then there’s a fairness issue. The thought is, ‘I had to go through it, so if you’re going to be here, you must go through it also.’”

The upsides to hazing?

Although these reasons may not necessarily seem valid enough to perpetuate a structure that leaves young workers bearing the brunt, this system also has some benefits. 

In some cases, says Thomas, assigning new workers the most gruelling, unpleasant or time-consuming tasks can actually be an effective way to help them learn. “In a lot of professions where you’re doing work that feels like a waste of time, you’re really engaging in what might be called tacit learning,” he says. “You’re getting many, many micro-lessons, learned through first-hand experience.”

It’s a model that goes back to the earliest days of industrialisation, and continues today: all trades are performed by masters and apprentices, and the latter is expected to learn by doing the mundane tasks assigned by the former.

“There will always be a difference in expertise between newcomers and experienced people,” says Thomas. “And newcomers will always have to find ways to gain expertise. Paying their dues is a good way to do that.”

It’s like, OK, get on your hands and knees and clean the poop off the floor just like the rest of us did – Caitlin

Having a shared experience, even – or especially – if it’s not enjoyable, can also bond people together effectively. “There are studies that show groups that employ hazing have stronger measures of cohesion,” adds Thomas. “And this is the double-edged sword of it: the people who are left at the end are closer, more knitted to each other, they identify more strongly with each other.”

And most people aren’t seriously scarred by the period of time spent paying their dues – hence the perpetuation of the system, and their willingness to do it to others.

“I think you have to have a sense of humour,” says Caitlin, the nurse. “Yes, you’re the new kid and you need to get your feet wet and learn, so you get the gross jobs. But that’s where everybody started. So, it’s like, OK, get on your hands and knees and clean the poop off the floor just like the rest of us did.”

When people who have been subjected to hazing are asked about it, says Thomas, “there’s a not-insignificant number who will laugh about it. They look back on it with warmth and affection, and something almost like nostalgia.”

Already, says Caitlin, the long night shifts and dirty jobs have bonded her to her colleagues, both at her level and above. 

“We’ll laugh about it all later at the bar,” she says. “There’s a lot of camaraderie. I’ve become like the little sister of the unit, and it’s because I’m a good worker and I’ve got grit. I do hard work and I don’t complain about it, and that is what our culture is about. You’re going to do the dirty work and laugh about it later, and that’s how you make it on our unit. We’ve had people who are prima donnas and don’t want to do the dirty work, and they no longer work on our unit.”

The creep of toxicity

A culture of dues-paying might not be all bad, but there is a difference between expecting young workers to do certain tasks versus creating an unfair environment – or even a toxic one.

During her first year on the job, which corresponded with the height of the pandemic, Caitlin says the fairness scale began to tip too far. “I worked nights for weeks straight in ‘Covidland’ – what we call the Covid side of our unit. We started noticing none of the older staff got Covid assignments, and it was all the new nurses were doing.” It took almost a year, she adds, to learn the basic skills she needed to do her job outside the Covid ward. “It was really mentally exhausting, and I almost walked away from nursing because of it. When it comes to the point where your mental health and physical health are in danger, the line has been crossed.”

There's a fine line between asking workers to pay their dues at the start of their career and a hazing culture that turns toxic (Credit: Getty Images)

This rings true for 24-year-old Thulasi Seshan, who found the process of paying her dues as an organiser on major US political campaigns to be completely untenable. She worked 12-hour days – or longer – doing field work, data entry and phone calls. Plus, the door-to-door canvassing of the job also meant that, as a woman of colour, she dealt with almost daily incidents of racism or misogyny.

Seshan says the idea of hazing bottom-rung workers isn’t a bad idea in theory. “You’re young, you’re energetic, you work hard, learn the ropes and we’ll give you more responsibility,” she says. “But instead it’s become, ‘let’s take these young people and burn them into the ground’.”

But after taking on that grunt work, Seshan never moved up the ladder: instead, she left politics.

A homogeneity problem 

Underrepresented workers like Seshan leaving due to hazing represents another problem: the perpetuation of homogeneous organisations. 

In her experience, Seshan found the workers who did make it through the grunt-work stage were people with financial security or family assistance to make an underpaid position workable. Often, they also had local homes at which they could stay. “It’s a lot harder if you’re black and don’t have a family home in Northern Virginia [close to job headquarters in Washington, DC]. The result is homogeneity of people at the top.”

It’s become, ‘let’s take these young people and burn them into the ground’ – Thulasi Seshan

Although this may not always be the case, Thomas also recognises organisational homogeneity as a knock-on issue. In a system where the goal is for newcomers to “prove themselves”, not everyone will; for some employees, the work will prove too difficult or unfair, and they may not ever move up the ladder or be accepted by the team. “The result – the people who are left – is often a group of people who are, in some way, the same.” 

However, Thomas says there may be reasons to believe we could be beginning to move away from the long-accepted system of young workers paying their dues. “Gen Z may not be attracted to these groups that are more homogenous,” he says. “They might not necessarily want to earn a place there, and they might not be willing to pay the dues.”

Still, says Thomas, the culture has existed for so long, and is so pervasive, it won’t necessarily change easily. Although there are ways to “increase group cohesion and shared identity without this” system, getting rid of the hazing culture involves someone to step up.

 “Who’s going to be the first to change it?” he says. “Someone is going to have to be the first to say, ‘when it’s time for you to be part of the group, I’m just going to let you in – no dues required”.