According to GALLUP Report 2017 less than one third of all employees in the US are engaged at work (numbers in other countries are even worse). Wow, that’s rough. Now I understand why everybody is looking so sad in the metro this morning.
How is this possible?
Work, for the most of us, is the most time consuming activity beside of sleeping. It should be your first priority, to not be among those two third unhappy people. Nevertheless if you are, don´t blame yourself. I will show you that many of the factors that cause our dreams to disappear at work are not within our control and power.
So here is some though about your 9-5 job:
Expectations
If you belong to Generation Z or Y, your expectations are probably too high. Why? In our modern society which is reigned by Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Hollywood it is very easy to build high expectations as most people and movies give the impression of having perfect lives. You get the impression that this is how your real life should look alike.
When you were a kid, you probably watched a lot of movies and set up role models. “Wow, Daddy, look at this cool Astronaut, Superhero, Fireman or whatever… I want to be like him!”
But in the real world there aren’t only Sport and Movie Stars, Nobel-prize winners and fancy new economy 4.0 start-up billionaires. Actually there is a lot of unpleasant work to do for our society to be successful. Somebody has to pick up the garbage, drive the bus line 156 in West Peacetown for 250 days a year, do the accounting stuff for all the companies out there and make the sandwiches in your next local Subway store wearing a stupid cap for a starvation wage.
Your job problem could be a problem managing your expectations that you developed during your lifetime. You want to have a dream job. A job which fulfills you, in which you are successful and earn a lot of money. These expectations are high and the possibility for a mismatch with reality is quite high.
People that are starving in Africa would laugh about this problem.
What is a Dream Job?
During our career we begin to suspect that our lives have been misdirected at some point. There is this underlying, disturbing feeling when you wake up in the morning.
For example, we joined a car company because we like fast cars and are fascinated about technology only to realize that somebody has to sell these cars, too. You will have difficult clients and your performance will be measured and compared by the monthly sales budget. And somebody has to do the bookkeeping stuff. Even if you work in the technical department you will not work 100% of the time with cars but sit in endless boring meetings, fulfill reports and memos and have superficial small talks with your co-workers.
Or maybe you joined the pharmaceutical industry to heal AIDS. But now you can´t focus on your research because you have endless hours to make the paperwork and to discuss your research budget as the first priority is to maximize shareholders value.
How could we join such jobs?
It´s pretty simple. We just did not know the reality of those jobs or this education at the time that we decided to pursue this way. At that time we had to make a longterm decision without having the cognitive capabilities and the experience for finding that decision.
• How could you know at that time that this is your dream job?
• Did you have any experience on this job before?
• How can you know that this was the right choice?
No, you just had a picture in your mind of this job. How this job will probably be, what you will probably do. That’s it.
We are fascinated by these stories of extraordinary people who, from their youth, have realized their talents in their careers, i.e. Tiger Woods. It seems like their extreme success is their fortunate destiny. Tiger Woods was supported a lot in golf during his childhood. You assume that his must be possible for everyone.
In reality, most of us have to choose between different possibilities without knowing which activities would really fill us with joy and make us happy, which career options are available to us and which of them would suit us without any support or with bad advice. Often we have then made the wrong decisions under pressure and almost blind.
My job doesn´t make sense
If you are working in a big company and sitting 10 hours a day in a finance department juggling with numbers you know this feeling very well. What the hell did I do today? Who did I help? Which value did I create? Which suffering did I reduce?
You come to the conclusion that you wasted your day for the monthly paycheck. But wait, is this really true? Actually you helped someone. Somebody in your company back in time thought that it was necessary to create your position.
Probably your boss is happy that you deliver your outcome to him, so he doesn’t have to do it by himself (you reduce his suffering). Maybe 45 of the 345.000 numbers that you find in the annual statements of the company were delivered by your work. I understand your lack of motivation.
But you helped someone. Probably only a few stakeholders, but you did help. You just perceive your job as boring and senseless because you compare your work and status in society to Lionel Messi where is capable of bringing 50.000 people in a stage wanting to see him play soccer.
The main problem is also: profit maximization, the first Maxima of our economy, produces strange outcomes. It is profitable to sell useless things, if somebody is willing to pay. There are unhealthy foods, nearly malfunctioning medicine and technology which breaks for sure in some years.
Welcome to the logic of the economic market. There is no surprise that most employee’s don´t support the products of the company they are working for.
The Collegues
This is often the biggest stress factor in our daily work. Usually you sit with a bunch of random guys and/or girls in an office with similar education. Everybody has a different character and had different experiences in their lives.
To avoid dead people in the office, society created the word “professional”. Being professional means that you try to maintain a good relationship with every colleague and especially with your boss. If not, the workflow is disturbed by disputes and other time-consuming unproductive behavior.
Great! We have the solution!
The problem is, being professional is difficult and costs a lot of energy and often feels strange und impersonal.
Your colleague is an a****le and behaves like an ape? There is not that much that you can do about that if your boss likes him and you share work-flows with him. You must try to get a good relationship.
Your boss makes stupid, unfunny jokes but still everybody in the team laughs? Of course, you don’t have to laugh. But you will attract attention and you could be described in the end as “was not able to be integrated in the team”.
Outside the office you could simply make some distance to those people above but it is difficult in professional life. In the end, for the most of us, it feels like a stupid game we have to play every day only to get our monthly salary.
Often our dignity suffers, our peace of mind is disturbed and our self-esteem is getting wounds. But nobody cares. The expectation of your boss is that you have the skill of Professionalism and in a big company it is often even more important than your technical skills. Your boss is paying for that.
Winner takes it all
Many of us don’t receive recognition for the work that we do on a daily basis. We feel unmotivated and replaceable. If our boss would tell us sometimes that he likes our work and carry us forward we would feel happy and motivated.
But most bosses just don’t have this good attitude. They probably feel sh**y themselves. Maybe your boss doesn´t get motivation from his boss, neither. Or maybe he is just bad. There are so many bad bosses out there which are completely overstrained with leadership and management, you would be surprised.
To overcome the motivation problem modern companies created a career system. After some years you get promoted. You get more responsibility and money. The problem is that companies are structured like pyramids.
Not everybody is able to be CEO in the end. In each group with ambitious colleagues, only one will be promoted in the end. And this promotion is often due only in part to talent and achievement. The promotion system is not fair. Often the outcome is random.
• Who gets along with whom?
• Who is like the son he wished to have for the boss?
• Who was in the right place at the right time?
• …[endless random events]
The Wage
“I work so much but my wage is so low!” This is what I often hear. First of all, try to think about your outcomes. Yes, your outcomes, not the work you invested to achieve those outcomes. We live in a society where the outcome is everything that matters.
You work hard, sweat like hell in our office to deliver the outcomes for the day and you have a low wage? Maybe these outcomes, in the subjective perception of your boss or the company, is just not worth more that the wage he is paying to you.
You worked late hours to improve the Software of the purchase department from the company to compare prices faster? Doesn´t matter if your boss only decides the purchases based on calls of sales people from purchasers and doesn’t use IT.
But even if your wage is above the median (31.099 $ in US 2016) your hourly rate probably sucks. Just check it, divide your monthly income after tax by the hours you worked. If you are living in a big and expensive city you work half the month only for paying the rent of a little-to-medium sized apartment.
Also remember that the costs for food, for flights and for some electronic stuff is ridiculous low nowadays because of the competition. Think about the following facts:
• Investors wants dividends for their stocks,
• Private equity companies are very successful restructuring companies and doing this mostly via cutting personnel costs,
• The big bonuses of the top 0,4 % executive members has to be payed.
Yes, I think you get a feeling from where they did cut the costs to achieve this low competitive prices, paying yearly dividends, turning failed companies into winners and paying enormous bonuses.
So after all, what can we do now? Go kill ourselves?
First of all I wanted to show you that most of our rage and frustration comes from factors and variables which you just cannot control easy so please first of all make peace with your job situation.
Don´t blame yourself, better take action. I will show you in the next posts how to improve your life management and escape this bad situation in which you feel stuck and hopeless.
And please change something! Working in a job that you hate will make you unhappy, will cause serious health problems and will make you regret your life.
