Why We Work

Introduction

• Why do we work? Satisfied workers are engaged by their work. They lose themselves in it. Not all the time, of course, but often enough for that to be salient to them.
• Satisfied people do their work because they feel that they are in charge. Their workday offers them a measure of autonomy and discretion. And they use that autonomy and discretion to achieve a level of mastery or expertise. They learn new things, developing both as workers and as people.
• Why is it that for the overwhelming majority of people in the world, work has few or none of these attributes? Why is it that for most of us, work is monotonous, meaningless, and soul deadening? Why is it that as capitalism developed, it created a model for work in which opportunities for the nonmaterial satisfactions that might come from it-and inspire better work- were reduced or eliminated? Workers who do this kind of work- whether in factories, fast-food restaurants, order fulfilment warehouses, or indeed, in law firms, classrooms, clinics, and offices do it for pay. Try as they might to find meaning, challenge, and room for autonomy, their work situation defeats them. The way their work is structured means that there really is little reason to do these jobs except for pay.
• Gallup Poll (2013)- there are twice as many “actively disengaged” workers in the world as there are engaged workers who like their jobs.
• The questions Gallup asks capture many of the reasons for work I just listed. The opportunity to do our work “right,” to do our best, to be encouraged to develop and learn, to feel appreciated by coworkers and supervisors, to feel that our opinions count, to feel that what we do is important, and to have good friends at work are all aspects of work that the survey taps. And for the overwhelming majority of people, work falls short-very short. The question is why? This book will offer an answer.

The False Rationale

• For more than two centuries, we have absorbed, as a society and as individuals, some false ideas about our relationship to work. People do things for incentives, for rewards, for money. You can see this view operating in the “carrot and stick” approach that has dominated efforts to solve the world’s recent financial crisis.
• According to The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
• It is in the inherent interest of every man to live as much at ease as he can; and if his emoluments are to be precisely the same, whether he does or does not perform some very laborious duty, to perform it in as careless and slovenly a manner that authority will permit.
• Smith’s belief in the power of incentives led him to argue for organising work by dividing labour into simple, easily repeated, essentially meaningless units. As long as people were getting paid for what they did, it didn’t matter very much what their jobs entailed. And by dividing labour into little bits, society would gain enormous productive efficiency.
• Smith’s view of human beings was far more subtle, complex and nuanced than what is captured in the quotes above. But, in the hands of Smith’s descendants, much of the nuance and subtlety was lost.
• In the pin factory example, he agrees people wouldn’t enjoy working at the pin factory, but also they wouldn’t enjoy anywhere else. He was trying to tell us that only reason people do any work is for the payoffs it produces. As long as it produces adequate payoffs, what the work itself consists of doesn’t matter.
• I don’t mean to suggest here that work was bliss prior to the industrial revolution. By no means. But the work of farmers, craftsmen and shopkeepers, hard though it may have been, offered people a fair amount of discretion, autonomy and variety in what they did each day.
• Only the “elite” want challenge, meaning and engagement, and can expect it from their work. Aside from being more than a little arrogant, this view is incorrect. Many people who do what we think as mundane jobs- janitors, factory workers, call-center employees- care about more than their wage. And plenty of professionals just work for the money.
• What people come to seek in work largely depends on what their work makes available. And the condition of human labor created by the industrial revolution, and perpetuated thanks in part to theories from the social sciences, have systematically deprived people of fulfilment from their work. In doing so, they have deprived people of an important source of satisfactions- and produced inferior workers in the bargain.
• Unorthodox, attention-grabbing practices of Google and other high-flying Silicon Valley companies may give the impression that assembly-line drudgery is a thing of the past. But like gravitational force, the notion that people work only for pay has repeatedly brought loftier hopes about what is possible in the workplace back down to earth. Over the centuries, Adam Smith’s ideas about human nature have proven extremely resilient.
• Ideas or theories about human nature have a unique place in the sciences. We don’t have to worry that the cosmos will be changed by our theories about the cosmos. The planets really don’t care what we think or how we theorize about them. But we do have to worry that human nature will be changed by our theories of the human nature.

When Work Is Good

• Why do so few people get satisfaction from their work. Two explanations come to mind:
• Only certain kinds of jobs permit people to find meaning, engagement, discretion, and autonomy, and opportunities to learn and grow.
• Pretty much every job has potential to offer people satisfying work if not for incredible efficiency of routinized, assembly-line type of work.
• Either satisfying work is not for everybody, or unsatisfying work is the price we pay for material prosperity, or both. Both are plausible, but both are WRONG.
• Your job might be defined in some way, and you might do it in a slightly different way. For example, take Luke, a hospital custodian who understood and internalized the value of hospital and medical care. This is job crafting, when people see themselves playing an important role in an institution whose aim is to see to the care and welfare of patients.
• People see their work as three things- job, career and calling. It varies a lot on how you look at it.
• People who see their work as a job enjoy little discretion and experience minimal engagement or meaning. People with jobs see work as a necessity of life, they work for pay, they would switch jobs if given the chance to earn more money, they can’t wait to retire, and they would not encourage their friends or children to follow in their footsteps.
• People who see their work as a career generally enjoy more discretion and more engage. They may even enjoy what they do. But their focus is on advancement. They see themselves as following a trajectory that leads to promotion, higher salary, and better work.
• People who see their work as a calling find it most satisfying. For them, work is one of the most important parts of life, they are pleased to be doing it, it is a vital part of their identity, they believe their work makes the world a better place, and they would encourage their friends and children to do this kind of work.
• What determines how people think about their work? Characteristics of the person + Kind of work one does.
• How were Luke and Carlotta able to craft their job? Even if they were not actively encourage to craft their work into callings? Because they wanted to craft their jobs into callings, and because it was not forbidden. (this is the key)
• Why would anyone forbid people to work the way Luke and Carlotta work? Primary reason is always efficiency. Second reason is the desire on part of managers for control.
• You don’t need to be working for an organization that saves lives to find meaning and purpose in what you do. You just need to be doing work that makes people’s lives better.
• The lessons from the custodians, the carpet makers, and the hairdressers is that virtually any job has the potential to offer people satisfaction. Jobs can be organised to include variety, complexity, skill development, and growth. They can be organised to provide the people who do them with a measure of autonomy. And perhaps most important, they can be made meaningful by connecting them to the welfare of others.
• If satisfying work makes for better workers, surely market competition would have seen to it that every company organized work to enable employees to get satisfaction out of the jobs they did. We’ve been doing this market-competition thing for a long time, and you’d think that by now, conditions of work would surely have evolved to produce maximum efficiency.
• Pfeffer suggests something of a downward spiral. A company starts to have trouble, because of low profits, high costs, and poor customer service. This leads to efforts to cut costs and make the company Mean and mean: less training, salary reductions, layoffs, part-time workers, a freeze on hiring and promotion. These changes lead to decreased worker motivation to excel, decreased effort, even worse customer service, less job satisfaction and more turnover, which in turn leads to more trouble for the business.
• In short, you take discretion, engagement, and meaning out of work and people get less satisfaction from doing it. As they get less satisfaction from doing it, they do it less well. As they do it less well, their supervisors take even more discretion away. The “cure” makes the disease even worse.
• The knee-jerk response to competitive pressure-cutting staff, speeding up workers, monitoring performance closely-makes the situation worse, by reducing the effectiveness (and the satisfaction) of the workforce. Thus, it creates a vicious cycle, as the more employers do to try to regain their edge, the further behind they fall.
• By contrast, paying attention to enhancing the character of work creates what we might call a virtuous cycle. When people find engagement and meaning in the work they do, it makes them happy to go to work and as psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has shown, when, people are happy they work better and they work smarter.