Hating What You Do

http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14586131

by riffer • 17 years ago

44 15 17 years ago

azanar• 17 years ago

What I hope: the comments on this article don't become yet another conference of blowhards and apologists.

The frequency at which I've seen comments paraphrased as "So you hate your work; welcome to life, now shut up and get back to it," is disheartening. I am surprised the number of people, even on HN, who see this mutual antagonism as not just a self-fulfilling prophecy, but one that can and will sustain itself indefinitely.

I honestly don't think it will. In fact, I think it already failed some time ago, and we are feeling the effects of it right now.

The article brings up the number of people who are, or at least feel that they are, stagnating at their current jobs. It also draws the connection between the feeling stagnation and a reduction in productivity and competitiveness. But stagnation isn't typically a temporally local phenomenon; a person does not usually become redundant or stagnant overnight. However, their realization that they are redundant or stagnating can occur overnight, often after ignoring the warning signs for as long as they consciously can.

But productivity isn't just affected by the feeling of stagnation and vulnerability; it is affected by the actual stagnation that an expectation of mutual loyalty causes. The worker can become lazy with the expectation that the employer will keep them on anyway, provided they aren't completely incompetent. This is a considerable threat if the worker doesn't give a damn about their work past the paycheck; what incentive do they have to be anything but as lazy as possible. They were clinging on to their jobs before, but the recession made them acutely aware that they were doing so and how tenuous their grip has now become.

This apathy also negatively affects productivity and competitiveness. But no one notices, because it is business as usual; at least it was. But now employers have started to notice, but they are solving the wrong problem; they assume the problem is one of insufficient data or insufficient supervision. They never assume that one or more of their underlying assumptions about their workforce, and what makes them most effective, might not be true and might never have been true.

I hope that people wake up to the larger lesson this turmoil is wanting to teach all of us. Unproductive people working in what are effectively sinecures are not a sustainable way to run an economy based on the production and distribution of wealth. Eventually, someone will ask where all this wealth is, and won't abide a waffling, noncommittal answer.

cwan• 17 years ago

Not entirely sure what you're trying to say, but just because someone is unhappy doesn't make them unproductive - certainly and quite likely less productive - but not unproductive (and almost certainly productive enough to be worth more than their cost). While the Economist tries to point some of the blame on measurements on performance, I would make the argument that it's the wrong measures that are the problem. After all, churn/attrition obviously greatly affects productivity/performance as can happiness.

I suspect employers have and do get better at managing people as it's always the best ones who are able to (and often do try to) find work elsewhere in good times and bad. For the employers who don't change, they're left with the results of adverse selection.

Confusion• 17 years ago

the actual stagnation that an expectation of mutual loyalty causes

So you're basically advocating that employers and employees should not be loyal to each other, so there won't be any feelings or expectations of loyalty that can negatively impact productivity. That completely ignores the positive effects of loyalty, which are well documented.

You're being an armchair economist, that has identified a single relationship that he uses to explain everything.

LogicHoleFlaw• 17 years ago

advocating that employers and employees should not be loyal to each other

Unfortunately I have yet to personally see an example of a corporation being loyal in my lifetime. On the contrary I have seen the trust of family members abused by their employers.

I do believe in positive effects of loyalty, but that loyalty can only function when it is mutual. The reality I have seen for myself and my family is that corporate loyalty does not exist. Individual humans can be well-intentioned but organizational behavior is the ultimate arbiter of the relationship.

One definite misfortune of the current state is that the power relationship between employer and employee is unbalanced. In theory that relationship is a capitalistic trade of time for money, but the severing of that relationship is far more disruptive to the individual. I think much of the resentment found among employees results from the loser's choice between a poor employment situation and the uncertainty and upheaval of changing employers.

Only I can take responsibility for my own well-being.

Edit: The one counterexample I have seen is SAS. That privately-owned company treats its employees extremely well. Its turnover rate is also nonexistent.

Quarrelsome• 17 years ago

You'd be hard pushed to find an organisation that is able to be loyal to it's employees. There are some but they're in the minority, especially if we're talking about a company that can employ a lot of people.

The whole employer-employee relationship has inherent friction due to pay. This affects trust and loyalty. It is an employee's responsibility to ensure they maximise their earnings for the skills they have and it is the company's responsibility to keep outgoings low. Such a scenario will always breed suspicion if the working relationship is not sweet and parties do not spell out their long-term expectations.

cojadate• 17 years ago

I'm glad to see the Economist raise this subject. I've known so many people who hate their jobs, it really does seem like it should be higher up on the political agenda than it is.

This article brings up two particularly interesting points for me.

Firstly, do performance measures increase productivity? Apparently, they actually decrease productivity, at least if productivity involves creative problem-solving: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

Secondly, can standard corporations genuinely recognize and implement the 'human side' of management, as the article says they should. I would argue not. The standard corporation is owned by a large number of shareholders with no personal connection to the corporation and no interest in anything other than profiting from their shares. Because of this arrangement, it is inevitable that profit is the only value that counts in corporate management. If management adopts a 'touchy-feely' approach it can only be justified if this is found to increase profits, and it would do nothing to prevent their being discarded as soon as it becomes profitable to do so. A genuine recognition of the 'human side' of management would be a recognition that humans are ends in themselves, not means to an end. But in a standard corporate structure, employees are inevitably just cogs in a profit-making machine.

weaksauce• 17 years ago

Thanks for the TED link. I agree with the statement that Dan states in the video about results oriented work spaces. I would like (more) to work for a company that offers this as part of the corporate culture. I think it can only work in the context of managers that can actually set realistic goals though which seems to be tough in software development.

swombat2• 17 years ago

Serious advice: if you feel suicidal because of a company reorg, DO NOT start a start-up.

percept• 17 years ago

Another consideration may be failure on one's own terms, versus being fired on a whim:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness_economics

swombat2• 17 years ago

If a company reorg (something most competent people can navigate without too much stress) makes you suicidal, I'd say that the wealth of impending disasters in a start-up (only some of which feel under your control most of the time) will drive you insane much more quickly.

brown9-2• 17 years ago

However you might feel about the topic, 24 work-related suicides at a single company in just two years is staggering. Do any US companies have statistics like this?

niels_olson• 17 years ago

I'm an intern in a navy hospital. The most common, daily, reason for psychiatric admission of an active duty member (we see all services) is suicidal ideation or attempt. I'm not counting the malingerers. I'm counting people who have been through multiple psych interviews and psychiatrists who see suicide day in and day out agree this patient merits 24-hour observation. That's one hospital. There are dozens of military hospitals. I wouldn't be surprised if the US military has 24 new suicidal admits a day.

Xixi• 17 years ago

France Telecom has 187,331 employees (wikipedia). It might be "a single company", but it's 9 times bigger than Google...

Even if you restrict it to France (where I think these suicides occured), that's still roughly 100,000 employees, so 5 times Google.

Of course it's sad and France Telecom should definitely improve the situation. Not a single employee should commit suicide because of work. But it's not staggering.

France suicide rate is somewhere around 17 or 18 in 100,000.

yummyfajitas2• 17 years ago

On the topic of France Telecom, 24 suicides in about 18 months is a shocking number being used by unions and activists to make their case.

It's shocking that they could be so dishonest by presenting a statistically normal suicide rate as high. The suicide rate in france is 26.1/100,000 for men and 9.4/100,000 for women. France Telecom has about 100,000 employees, so in 18 months we'd expect about 26 suicides (assuming it's 50% men, 50% women).

http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suicider...

Further context: most of the workers at France Telecom can't be laid off and are simply being moved from one job to another as part of a reorg. This causes stress, because workers might have to learn something new! Sacre bleu!

A chart of working hours by nation (look who is 4'th from the bottom):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yearly_working_time_2004.j...

Hating What You Do

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