How to be happy at work | Stuart Jeffries
August 15, 2009 by admin
Filed under Career News and Advice
Photograph: Colin Campbell
‘There is one good thing about this recession,” says Alain de Botton, author of The Pleasures And Sorrows Of Work. “We have grown up with the view that wealth is deserved and if you work hard you will succeed. The idea was that this is fair – that was the Thatcherite ethos.” In the past two years, he argues, we’ve woken up to reality: “How can it be fair that a banker is worth 350 times a nurse?”
For much of the 20th century, de Botton says, the burgeoning industry of career coaches and occupational therapists was premised on the notion that unhappy or redundant workers had only themselves to blame. “Now responsibility has shifted from iniduals to a system that is clearly unfair. Redundancy is no longer just seen as your failure.”
This may (or may not) offer solace to those suffering the misery of unemployment, but what about those of us who still have jobs? Finding fulfilment in the workplace can be a challenge at the best of times; in a recession, many of us struggle in jobs we don’t really enjoy because of a lack of other options. So is it possible to improve your working life without changing your job?
De Botton points out that we didn’t always expect to be happy at work. We just got on with what the American writer Studs Terkel called “a Monday-to-Friday sort of dying”. “For most of our history,” de Botton says, “work was seen as God’s punishment for Adam’s sins.” But in the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin argued that being active and working hard were paths to fulfilment – a thesis soon undermined by mass industrialisation. “That’s one reason Marx and Engels wrote so angrily: the modern factory returned work to what it was – suffering and toil,” de Botton says.
So should we forget about achieving fulfilment at work and instead knuckle down and realise workplace dissatisfaction is a luxury in a recession? After all, shouldn’t we be grateful to still have a job? “There is a survivor syndrome,” says career coach John Lees, author of How To Get A Job You’ll Love, “but it doesn’t always work the way you might think. You might imagine the employee, overwhelmed by guilt and precariousness, works hard gratefully. But many think, ‘My employer isn’t the kind of person I thought they were – what else is out there?’”
There is, in other words, a trust recession, too. According to a recent survey by management consultants McKinsey, 85% of executives believe trust in businesses has fallen. “It takes time to rebuild; organisations will need to think and communicate differently,” says Tom O’Byrne, CEO of …
Read the original article at Guardian
