compliments of
FutureVisionsSM
creating sustainable results in growth and performance
Does this seem like anyone you know: "They felt constantly on trial yet never
knew exactly where they stood. There were no objective measures which applied to
doing a good job." Truthfully, this seems to apply to most of us, doesn't it?
The result is anxiety, insecurity and stress. We pursue the dream of a
breakthrough - of our true worth being acknowledged - which might finally make
sense of our work and reconfigure the downsizing, re-organizations and new
assignments into the meaningful trajectory of a career.
The new work ethic has been astonishingly successful at exploiting our
insecurities as employees and disciplining us to work harder than our parents or
grandparents probably ever did - and with zero job security. The feat has been
remarkable, particularly in corporate America, where hundreds of thousands of
white-collar workers throughout the early to mid-90s were made redundant, yet
managed no collective protest. Instead, they redoubled their efforts - hours of
work lengthened significantly over the same period - to devote most of their
waking hours to those same corporations.
The new work ethic tantalizes the white-collar worker with the possibility of
satisfactions that are just out of reach, thus heading off potential challenges
to the way work is organized and continually throwing the problem back on to the
individual to resolve.
More and more of our life is taking place at work, so that "work-life balance"
is a misnomer.
In the overwork culture, personal relationships are forced to take on the role
of offsetting the stress: love, like leisure, is purloined as an adjunct to keep
the worker going. After a gruelling day at work, partners can expect little in
return. Meanwhile, the emotional engagement in work is reinforced by employers
who specifically address the emotional needs of their employees in a way that a
working spouse and parent could never hope to emulate. The more we are
invested at work, the less there is available for home.
One American company, recognizing the gap between work and intimate
relationships, decided to bring the latter into its orbit: their employees had
to specify at monthly meetings their professional and personal targets and
assess how they had matched up to them - the ultimate absorptive corporation
which makes it its business to ensure the success of your private life.
The focus is skewed from the reciprocity of intimacy to the preoccupation of the
self - its promotion, development, growth and career advancement. None of this
helps to nurture a resilient basis for the kind of emotional intimacy to which
people aspire, let alone for the kind of complicated negotiations required to
raise children.
As far back as the 50s the great US sociologist, C Wright Mills, worried that
white-collar workers sold not just their time and energy but also their
personalities to their employer. He believed that work took up too much of
people's time and shaped them in such a way as to destroy meaningful life
outside work. The overwork culture makes his fears as real as ever.
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