The world of work

It continually amazes me how so many people settle into their daily jobs without finding a way to be truly happy and fulfilled with their work. I am no exception. The modern "workplace" is commonly revered as a one of the largest sources of stress in the daily life of millions of people.

Today, in examining this topic, I would like to present a few unintelligent questions in an attempt to get at the root of workplace stress and why it is so prevalent in our daily lives. I am not going to go over the usual suspects such as (hopeless) time management, office politics, and so forth. Instead, in this writing I am laying out a set of reasons why I think people feel that they need to participate in these types of activities, due to an underlying set of false pretenses which we choose to accept every day we arrive at our place of work.

Unintelligent Question #1: You do not walk into a barber shop and ask for a free haircut, so why do your coworkers feel it is ok to ask you to do work for free?

Our (mostly) free market economy is based on voluntary participation in the exchange of values that benefit each party involved. In layman's terms, this means that both buyer and seller of a product or service are willing to participate in the transaction, and feel that the product/service they are receiving, or the value (ie. money) they are receiving in exchange for the product/service they are delivering is sufficient to make it a worthwhile exchange.

Now, enter the workplace. Right out of the gate, when we sign our letter to accept our job offer, we are effectively making s statement that we are worth X dollars to an employer, typically without any detailed plan for what work we will exactly be doing in the coming year. Mentally, we pay a huge price for gaining the "stability" of this steady paycheck. Sure, many workplaces also offer a performance incentive system to give employees bonuses for "exceptional job performance", however this does not address the initial fallacy that was made when offering the employee the job in the first place.

What is this fallacy? It is that employees are hired under these pretenses, then are "thrown into" the workplace and asked to participate in economic exchanges every day, with neither party knowing what the other is receiving in exchange for the service they are providing. This is about as far from a free market exchange of value as you can stray, since neither party has a way to set rational limits on what they are asking for. Two "parties" could be an employee and their manager, an employee and somebody else's manager, or two co-workers. Effectively, it does not matter what job title either party holds, the underlying false pretense remains.

Imagine, for a moment, what that scenario would be like at the barber shop, if no money was exchanging hands between barber and customer. Likely, the person performing the valuable service, the barber, would complain of shortages of supplies and labor (ie. their own time), because after all, who wouldn't want a haircut (or other type of valuable service) if it was free? Does this start to sound familiar? One of the key reasons that virtually every experiment in socialism in history failed was because of supply and labor shortages, due to a failure in the central planning model. More on this later.

By now, if you're still reading this article, you might be thinking that money is not the only reason people enter the workforce, and I would agree with you. Seeking a promotion is often one of the reasons why employees will make sacrifices in their time and life outside of work, but, why? The word "promotion" implies that you are making an upwards, not lateral, move in an organization, that you are in a position above others who did not receive the promotion. Does this mean that by taking on this new job, you are bettering yourself? This forms the basis if our next unintelligent question.

Unintelligent Question #2: If our job title is so important to us, why don't we carve it on our tombstone?

When we are young, a lot of us envision ourselves in positions of authority (ie. I want to be The Boss! I want to be CEO!) without having a vision of the actual day-to-day work we will be doing in those positions of authority, or all of the positions we will need to occupy in between before reaching this goal. When we grow up, some of us will take these notions into the workplace and seek these positions of authority, and as a secondary priority, perform the work necessary to be eventually promoted to these positions. I would argue that this is the predominant attitude in most workplaces today, to the extent that it is considered "taboo" to think otherwise, so many of us will accept promotions when they are offered to us, even if we are completely satisfied with the work we are doing in our present job. In reality of course, most of us would accept an offer for more pay, which is usually accompanied with a job promotion, and this factor alone would likely be the factor that "seals the deal"and would be the biggest reason why we wouldn't turn down the promotion. However, again we enter into the conundrum where we are being offered a larger sum of money without a direct connection to the actual value we will be creating for the employer. In effect, by being offered that promotion and pay raise, your employer is placing a fixed price on the overall value of your talents, experience and potential within the organization, reinforcing the notion that as you "move up the ladder", and in effect move further away from the actual hands-on activities that were the reason you were able to be hired in the first place, that your level of seniority within the organization is directly connected to the value you create for the organization. It is precisely this fallacy that is a major source of stress for many people in the workplace.

So, back to my unintelligent question, why don't we carve our job title on our tombstones? The answer is because as human beings, we realize that it's what we do in life that has an impact on the world, not who we are. For some unknown reason, this concept does not seem to translate into our understanding of the modern workplace.

Unintelligent Question #3: Why do we get paid to use other peoples' time, and call it "leveraging"?

Given the constraints in our daily lives, including what we encounter at work, as human beings we seek ways to maximize what we get for our inputs. For some, this includes asking others to do work on our behalf. For some reason, in the workplace this seems to be an ok thing to do. In short, this means at the office, we have less-than-complete control over our ability to perform work, for whom we want and the way we want. In an economic context, the most popular type of system where individuals do not own their labor, is socialism. In case you missed it, what I am saying is that when you step into the workplace every morning, you are entering a small-scale socialist universe. Don't believe me? Let's try to draw a few parallels.

Virtually every organization exists to provide a valuable service to the economy, or to society as a whole. For some reason, these same organizations feel it equally important to indoctrinate their employees into this same shared purpose, almost as if it is a natural thing to expect employees to bypass their own reason for doing what they do every day. Having an organizational mission is a valuable asset, however, the current trend appears to be to develop a strict employee culture around this mission and these shared goals. As a net result, employees measure their performance on how well or poorly they lived up to their organization's goals, and not their own. In the modern workplace, the "me" does not matter, it is only the "we". Where in history have we seen this before?

To wrap up this article, I'd like to loop back around to the concept of central planning. Central planning, in an economic context, is a concept where the productive outputs, and the material and labor inputs needed to create them, is determined by a central planning committee. At a macro level, this model has been tried by nations. At a micro level, it is my opinion that this model is alive and well within private and public sector organizations. Don't believe me? One of the most significant symptoms of central planning, in any organization big or small, is the scarcity of resources. In a large scale economy, typically it is a material shortage, and in organizations with knowledge workers it is a time (or people) shortage. How long did your department have to wait to be granted its last request for a new employee? Why can a decision to hire temporary help rarely be made at your department's level? Why does a request need to be made in the first place, shouldn't the value created by this additional resource be evident to the team that requires this person? I hope that some of the previous sections have outlined for you the reasons why this is not true. In the modern workforce we have created for ourselves, we have lost the direct connection between our own productive outputs and the actual value that we create in the marketplace.

In closing, I hope this article can offer some insights on what we give up, both personally and economically, when we accept that steady paycheck in the hopes of building a successful, stable life for ourselves. So, what's next? Truthfully, I do not know what better alternatives are available for organizations or for employees. The only thing that is certain to me is that the "workforce of the future" will be radically different from the one that we have today. I invite you to post comments so this debate can be continued, and maybe some decent solutions to these problems can be discussed. I'd love to hear your ideas!