A Different Drummer - Content Marketing Agency
A Different Drummer
Gallup is a consulting firm which conducts public opinion polls In 2018 they revealed their latest findings which showed 87% of workers are not engaged (read passionate) about their work
Australian surveys tend to be on par, with Gallup finding that 20% of people are actively disengaged - meaning they are either disruptive, unproductive, disloyal or all of the above A further 62% were neither engaged nor committed to either their role or their employer If these figures are sobering, spare a thought for workers in Singapore and China, of which a staggering 98% of people report being disengaged
Upon learning that only 13% of Germans felt happy about their work, the advertising firm Scholz & Friends created over twenty visual depictions of people being trapped in dispiriting service jobs The slogan they adopted for the campaign: “Life’s too short for the wrong job ” In tapping into the deep vocational misalignment in the collective psyche, the ads went viral and the job search site they were promoting saw its traffic skyrocket
Another job site to harness the zeitgeist of unfulfilling workaholism was Monster com, which parodied Nike’s aspirational approach It showed a succession of children speaking about growing up and savouring the multitude of employment humiliations awaiting them in the corporate world The ad starts with a child proclaiming, “When I grow up, I want to file all day ” Triggering nostalgia for that moment in time where we once felt hopeful about career possibilities, it provoked a reaction that made its website a household name overnight
From a historical perspective, the idea that people should love what they do for work is a recent one It challenges the entrenched belief that work is something to be endured Millennials are leading the charge, with consulting firm Deloitte finding that 7 out of 10 of them want to be creative at work Furthermore, they want their work to be meaningful with more than 7 out of 10 expecting their employers to focus on societal problems
Previous generations have underestimated the importance of job satisfaction With burgeoning choice and more awareness of concepts like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, things are changing
As we step through the five levels of job satisfaction in this chapter, consider where you find yourself and ask yourself whether or not you are among those who have stopped searching too early
???? Monster com advertisement - “When I Grow Up…”
Perhaps there are not so much terrible jobs as there are jobs that are a terrible match for our individual preferences The social scientist Malcolm Gladwell believes that when it comes to finding fulfilling work, we need three things: autonomy, complexity and a correlation between effort and reward
I thought about this while sitting in an optometrist’s chair Surely looking at people’s eyes all day couldn’t be very appealing? So I asked her if she found her job enjoyable She told me that having spent years in hospitality while at university she now found it liberating to no longer have to answer to bosses She liked the challenge of determining defects in people’s sight and spoke of the fulfilment that came from improving a person’s quality of life Not only was she meeting Gladwell’s requirements for job satisfaction but she also relished the social aspect to the work and found herself constantly meeting interesting people
How you feel about a job is determined by how closely it aligns with how you are wired The state of extreme dissatisfaction comes from doing repetitive, unchallenging work, involving interaction with people with whom you have little in common
Over the years I have had plenty of jobs that have failed to inspire - washing dishes in midsummer, delivering pizzas in a sprawling city where I continually got lost, doing the graveyard shift in a takeaway, robotically rolling newspapers into plastic bags, delousing kids at a summer camp and countless others
Despite the tedious nature of the roles, they each had aspects that made them bearable, unlike my stint doing data entry where I did nothing but type numbers into a computer hour after hour On top of the monotony, I was in a regimented environment where even the toilet breaks were timed There was no social interaction to break the dullness, no challenge, no creative input and the work felt entirely meaningless
Anaïs Nin once said that there is something inherently ugly about doing a job we don’t care for Cities spend enormous sums of money employing architects and designers to make our physical landscapes more pleasing Imagine if civic bodies directed a similar amount of energy into beautifying our working lives? Unless this occurs, people will continue working half-heartedly or forever cycle through one unsuitable job after another
Ironically, extreme job dissatisfaction can often become our herald or catalyst for change Reaching a certain level of despondency can get us thinking about what else might await us, as well as galvanise us into the state that Elizabeth Gilbert called ‘NOT THIS!’ Consider the example of Alan Hughes He was both creative and civically minded but found himself working as a sheet-metal worker in a factory surrounded by people who hated their work It was repetitive, detached from any sense of meaning and performed in a hostile environment He returned home each day thoroughly dispirited The extent of his despair prompted him to retrain and study visual communication at an evening college
Upon graduating, he left the factory to become a graphic designer for an organisation that shared his value system He found his tribe and a sense of fit in the human rights magazine New Internationalist After his gifts were given an opportunity for expression, he went on to write articles for them as well Having discovered work that vivified him, Alan flourished there until retiring thirty years later
Following our bliss is energising Work, by contrast, is depleting Author Michel Tournier claims this goes to show it is at odds with human nature
As a person moves beyond extreme misery on the satisfaction spectrum they reach the time-server mindset
In The Career Chase, Helen Harkness shares an example of how one worker remained with the same company, year after year, simply because they enjoyed the free cake that was doled out each day
At this level, work still lacks meaning, it only occasionally engages us and is undertaken primarily to earn a living Energy is diverted into activities outside of work and only the compensations of an income maintain one’s resolve to continue
I noticed this state while working in a bank with colleagues who had been there for over thirty years
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