It’s not so much that everyone wants a four-day work week, we just want something other than what we have now, and ultimately, I think most of us would much rather work around the rest of our lives as opposed to living the rest of our lives around work.
This is something that many of us older folks don’t get, but we should be thinking about much more. I think many of us who work in the technology, legal, or eDiscovery sectors can lose sight of how demanding careers in these industries are. We are quick to scoff at the idea that we should maybe figure out how to make them a little less demanding, or at least more friendly for diverse candidates who can’t simply work all night, or be on call 24 hours a day for our clients because that’s just the way it’s done in our industry. We tend to think that because all of the jobs in the industry are like that, we don’t have to worry about competitors offering something else to our employees.
We are not considering how many people we drive out of the industry completely, especially young people. There is a staffing shortage in these industries, and the companies struggling to find enough talent are not losing out to some other mysterious company in the industry who can pick and choose, we’re all in the same boat because the boat is leaking people every single day. People are making the choice to do something else because what we offer isn’t cutting it.
It can be very easy to lose sight of this on Social Media but it can also be easy to lose sight of this in the workplace or in our own careers as well. When we reward certain measurements people respond by doing more of that thing. This makes sense if your goal is to simply attract more attention to yourself. For social media maybe that is your goal. If you are representing a brand on social media, yeah that is probably what you want. However, as an individual, I think you have to ask yourself if getting more eyeballs this way causes you to actually undermine your own goals.
I talk a lot about the Great Resignation and employees taking control over their own careers instead of just following along with what the company wants them to do. I stand by it, and like Mark, I am also thrilled that we are seeing a shift in the balance of power as employees start to recognize their value. But, he also raises an important post in the LinkedIn post.
As long as you are there and getting paid you owe them your best. Be professional, even if the company isn’t. Do your job even if you plan on quitting tomorrow. Commit your best efforts to the project even if you don’t agree with it.
That’s it. I know there are some who will tell you that they are passionate about their work, and they “never work a day in my life”. Good for them, but we have to start admitting that is a very small, select, group of people in a very small, select number of jobs. There are not billions of jobs out there like that for everyone to just go get. There are not even millions of them. Maybe I’m not going to change the world by doing just interesting work with people I don’t hate. That’s OK because I have the time to change the world in my own little way when I’m not working instead.
I think this article, while helpful, also hints at a larger societal problem that many of us have been thinking about and that is what role our work plays in our overall lives and our sense of work. Working all the time isn’t just something we sometimes do. It’s part and parcel of being “important” in our society. Let’s face it, when someone tells us they disconnect in the evenings and weekends, our first thought is not “Oh how healthy”, it is much more to be “Oh you must not be very important then”.
Until that perception changes, I don’t know that we’ll make much progress, but it does need to change. Our work plays far too much of a role in our self-worth and therefore is it is far too easy to take advantage of employees.