Regardless of the economic environment, you’re bound to hear at least one or two stories from family or friends who are unhappy with their job. But in this current economic environment, there seems to be a lot of questions being asked on the value of work. It’s not that work isn’t important, but is it everything in a person’s life? Should it be?
The problem is, our society puts a lot of value in things and busyness. We’ve been taught to fill up our lives with activities and possessions. Literally. Scheduling our lives to the microsecond and buying bigger houses to store our ever expanding collection of things was just something that our society did. The saying “E pluribus unum” should have been replaced with “Keeping up with the Joneses” on all of our currency and coins over the past several decades. It was more apt.
So what’s the solution? First, the notion of a work week needs to change. If the new nature of work is more about the quality of ideas and quality of execution, it seems our notions of not only how we work but where and how frequently we produce work deliverables needs to change. Sometimes, the best place to come up with the next idea or how to execute that idea isn’t in an office, but on vacation. Or after you return from one. In short, we need to encourage people to get out of the office. But it’s not just about encouraging vacations. It can be about giving people more time to enjoy hobbies and other pursuits that aren’t work-related, but can spark employees to think differently. To think better.
Second, it seems people need to re-envision what a career path is. The old notions of what made a career need to be re-thought. And that young person who has held seven jobs in the past ten years may not be a job hopper or malcontent. They may have been just been trying to do what it took to get by. And who knows? That diverse skill set they built may actually be an asset.
Ultimately, this is about us. Are we going to continue to look to the same old ways of working and the same old notions of work as the way to leave this nation – and ultimately ourselves – forward? Or are we going to take a chance, have some guts and try to do things differently? To do them better? It’s all in our hands what we want our world of work to be.