Working With Spirit. Lucy Reid
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is done there. (It is important to note that often the “middle level” positions that are dropped by many organizations are advanced level, managerial positions.)
Let's pause for a moment and consider a question. If an organization drops several levels or layers of managers, what happens to the people who keep their jobs?
Many of them are going to have to do more work — their pre-change work plus the work of other staff who lost their jobs. And many workers will not only have to do more work; they will have to be able to work with less supervision. They will have to make more decisions on their own, take on more responsibility. This isn't all bad. Some workers will relish the added responsibility. Some will thrive in the new workplace. But without a doubt, most employees in today's organizations are finding themselves doing more work and suffering from increased stress and fatigue as a result.
At the same time, under-utilization is a serious problem. It includes unemployment, part-time employment (where full-time is desired), and under-employment. Human knowledge, skills, and imagination — gifts from God — are squandered by under-utilization all too often. Where over-work causes burnout, under-work causes rust-out.
There was a series of advertisements on TV some years ago to encourage giving money to African-American colleges in the US. Each ad was a vignette about an African-American student who might not be able to go to college. The ads ended with the slogan, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” This quotation captures the under-utilization of workers.
The rate of unemployment changes somewhat from year to year, and it varies across regions in Canada, but whatever the rate is, it represents real people who often feel neglected and without value. Since we define each other in terms of what we “do,” people who are unemployed may feel that they do not have an identity. As we experience an ever increasing rate of technological change that continuously alters the workplace, more and more people are likely to experience periods of unemployment. There is dignity in work, and being without work can rob us of our dignity and sense of purpose. “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” We need to be equipped to cope with unemployment (expected or unexpected) and not let a period of unemployment define us.
Part-time employment is another form of under-utilization. There are many situations where people desire part-time work and request it from employers, for example, a parent who needs to be home half-days with a child in kindergarten. Another example would be a person who is self-employed but needs to supplement that income with part-time work. The under-utilization aspect occurs when individuals are forced to settle for part-time employment. Many settle for several part-time jobs. Often university students find themselves in this situation. Part-time positions create flexibility for employers, and since part-time or occasional workers typically do not have contracts, they can be fired (and hired back) easily. Part-time workers also do not typically qualify for employee benefits. In essence they become expendable and cheapened. “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”
Under employment is in some ways the worst form of under-utilization of workers. Under employment is hiring people to fill positions that do not require their knowledge and skills. The taxi driver with a PhD is the example that journalists love to describe. The reality is that under-employment is widespread and a true waste of our precious human resource. Sociologists who have studied this inconsistency between job requirements and employees' credentials argue that employers need to increase the complexity of work that, say, college graduates occupy An economist might argue that the problem is really “over-education” and society should produce fewer college graduates if there are not enough jobs that require college degrees. Regardless of one's perspective on the origin of the problem, it is evident that people need to find jobs that are consistent with their education, knowledge, and skills. Being over-qualified for the work individuals are doing can be very discouraging, especially when the long-term prospects are not positive. “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”
Under-utilization has to be addressed from two viewpoints. At the macro level, how can we — through our governments — encourage and support employers and entrepreneurs to create more jobs and jobs that use the knowledge, skills, and imaginations of all our people? At the micro level, how can individuals get themselves out of situations where their knowledge, skills, and imaginations are not adequately employed? We may need to quit a secure job where we are under-employed and find one that uses our talents, despite the strong messages we will undoubtedly receive (both from others and from our own fearfulness) that this is folly. Retaining a job, even a less than ideal one, is generally regarded as more prudent than letting it go in order to look for something more fitting.
A spirituality for the workplace must have something to say about how we can find our rightful place in the world. We are searching for a place where we can engage our skills and experience, our knowledge, imagination, and passion. And we are searching for a place that neither consumes us with over-work nor leaves us bored and discouraged with underwork. We may need to renegotiate our work situation many times, both the externals of what we do and the internals of how we do it. We will need many inner conversations with ourselves (and such conversations are the heart of spirituality) about whether we are in the right place at any given point in our lives. And the answers will relate not to external success or any assumptions about what we should do, but to a personal sense that there is a rightness of fit between what we can offer the world and what work we are engaged in.
Questions
Is there a “rightness of fit” between you and the work you do?
Are burnout or rust-out concerns for you?
The impersonal work world
In our quest for work that fits with our gifts and life situation, the work environment itself may be problematic. Scott Adams's cartoon strip Dilbert exemplifies the cynical, conflict-ridden, fragmented world of work that many of us know. There is an incompetent but powerful boss who is not respected by his employees although they outwardly kow-tow to him. There is the nerdy computer geek, incapable of seeing beyond his techie horizons and socially very inept. And there is Dilbert, the alienated worker who does as little as he can get away with, ridicules the boss behind his back, and suffers the indignities of office power-plays and control issues. Through humour Adams caricatures a work world that is crippled by bureaucracy, stifled by rigid systems of management, and undermined by an absence of trust.
The success of the Dilbert cartoon suggests that many of us recognize this fictitious workplace. It is particularly within large organizations that the dysfunctional characteristics emerge, as hierarchies and regulations are developed to ensure that the jobs get done and employees are treated uniformly. A degree of impersonality enters, which inevitably separates bosses from workers and tends to create and perpetuate an Us and Them mentality. With a high degree of specialization in work now, people are often also working in isolation from their peers. Metaphorically we have moved from the family farm to the typing pool to the office cubicle, and the impersonal modes of communication made possible by email and other electronic media have further eroded human interaction at work.
In one telling cartoon strip, Dilbert's boss has his employees wearing electronic collars, so that he can track their whereabouts in the building at any time. “Once you got used to working in cubicles, like gerbils,” he says, “we knew anything was possible” [Adams 1996, 76]. A common complaint at work is that people feel like rats running faster and faster on wheels, or trapped in the constant performance of repetitive tasks. They may feel obliged to skip lunch breaks in order to get the work done, and a sense of hostility builds up, aimed at those who are requiring this level of output. Managers are in turn under pressure from executives, who are trying to steer their organizations through turbulent economic times with maximum efficiency and profit, and the cycle of resentment and tension continues.
Conflict and criticism
Where community and trust do not flourish in an organization, adversarial positions will often be taken between individuals and between groups almost instinctively. Like our parliamentary system with its government and