We measure what people watch because it’s easy. Then we make that the stand-in for the information we need to know, why they stay subscribers. Why they subscribe is a more complicated question, but it’s the question that matters if you’re selling subscriptions.
As the article mentions, this is a big reason why return-to-office mandates have destroyed the trust between management and employees. When I’m happily working remotely, finishing all of my tasks and projects on time, connecting with the people I need to collaborate with just fine, and reporting on the status of my work using the tools available, and you turn around and tell me that I need to be in the office to be more productive, I quickly see that for what it is. Despite the results, you don’t trust people to do their jobs.
When I hear people talking about how much more effective employees are when they make friends at work, it makes my hair stand on end a bit. Because the benefits of having good friendships don’t exist solely to make us better workers. We’re more than our work. Our work is a transaction that we take part in every day. We do work, our employer pays us. We shouldn’t let any kind of friendship or supposed loyalty blind us to that fact either. When our employers don’t consider the money they pay to be worth the work that we are doing, for whatever reason they have to think that, they have shown an uncanny willingness to let us go. There is no loyalty from that end of things and so no loyalty is deserved from the other end of the transaction either.
In other words, I’m more than simply a worker. I’m more than a cog in the capitalist system that pays me for my labor. We all are, but we don’t always act like it, and I suspect that Helen is correct in her assumption that part of the reason is that we have prioritized work so far above and beyond the rest of our lives that we don’t have anything else to do.
That’s not a recipe for a healthy and balanced life.
The thing is, there are still so many people who look at a resume with a few different jobs in the early years and see someone who is unstable, all the while employers are designing these jobs to turn over, and then laying people off when they don’t turn over as much as they expected them to. So maybe stop worrying so much about whether changing jobs is going to look bad and focus on finding a place where you can do the work that you want to do.
The promise of working hard and being rewarded is hard to swallow when you’ve seen Gen X and Millennials work hard and get absolutely nowhere. Forced to start over again and again as successive organizations let them go, or went under, while the people who ran those organizations got paid millions.