Vigeland: You spoke with about a thousand workers, non-management types about their perspectives on work. What did you hear?
Davis: We were somewhat surprised to hear that over half of these workers feel that their careers are stagnant or in limbo.
Vigeland: And did they tell you why?
Davis: Yes, they did. How I would term this is they said that they were “in the no.” They had no challenging assignments, they have no opportunities to learn new skills, they have no room to advance, they get no recognition and they have no line of sight to how their jobs fit in with the objectives of the organization.
Vigeland: Then how do those feelings of stagnation manifest themselves in the workplace. What’s happening?
Davis: People are going to actively seek new jobs as the economy improves. People are saying things like, “I just do what’s asked of me, nothing more, nothing less. I just do my job and go home.” As opposed to people that say, “I’m interested in what I do, I’m excited about going to work.” And it has a negative impact on productivity and quality and customer service in organizations.
Greetings.
Allow me to ask, courteously and rhetorically, what is incredible about this? Most people who’ve had “non-management” jobs (and many who’ve had “management” ones) know that hard work, performance and commitment to the organization often have no relation whatever to the type and level of reward one receives (adjusted for type of job, of course — no one expects the mail clerk to make what the CEO does). I will spare you the stories, but I have direct experience of this myself.
Let me note as well that the standard-issue screeds of both liberals [i]and[/i] conservatives often have very little relevance to the phenomena as I have observed them.
regards,
JPB
JPM I think the percentage is what is surprising, not the fact that it is there at all. It is a sad commentary on the nature of “working life.”
Dr. Harmon:
Speaking as someone with current and personal experience of “working life”, and knowing a good number of others in that situation, the number sounds quite credible to me.
Dr. HE Baber, sometime commentator on The Episcopal Church and other matters, has a tendency to go over the top in a liberal direction sometimes, but [url=”http://theenlightenmentproject.blogspot.com/search/label/work”]this excerpt[/url] from her blog, dated July 27, 2007, resonates with me.
[quote]Work in one sense, strenuous intellectual or physical exertion that produces a result is fulfilling, satisfying and conducive to human flourishing. But most jobs are nothing like that: they’re just drudgery and enforced idleness, doing dull, boring repetitious tasks and filling time in a confined space until the day is over. Moralists castigate the loafers, loungers, slackers and bums who don’t, won’t or can’t do this drudge work, assuming that the alternative is, as one commentor or this blog suggested, playing Nintendo or simply vegging out. Work, they claim, is fulfilling, satisfying and conducive to human flourishing. But this is coming from the perspective of the tiny minority of individuals, at most 20% of the population, whose jobs are interesting, strenuous and productive, and who exploit the ambiguity to suggest that the rotten, mind-numbing drudgery that most people do is fulfilling, satisfying and conducive to human flourishing. Most people are scanning groceries, answering phones, inputting data, waiting tables, flipping burgers, sorting paper clips and shuffling papers to look busy, or just staring into space until they can get out. That’s real work. It has to be done, but it doesn’t benefit the people who are forced to do it in any way.
At least let’s be honest about it. There are lousy jobs that have to be done–and most jobs are lousy. We have a life-lottery to see who will be sacrificed, as in the old Shirley Jackson story. The losers, the majority of the population, will have lives that are barely worth living. We underestimate the number of people who are sacrificed because we won the lottery and hang out with winners, and underestimate the sheer lousiness of the work others do because we’ve never done it for any extended period of time or imagined that we could be stuck doing it for all of our adult lives. We cover our tracks by moralizing and lying to ourselves: we pretend to believe, and maybe convince ourselves, that people who do lousy jobs don’t suffer as much as we would if we did these jobs and that they could, if they chose, do better for themselves.[/quote]
regards,
JPB