ALT-2 Can you Find Fulfillment at the Workplace
Is fulfillment in the workplace one of the benefits of our twenty-first century culture, or a myth perpetrated by big corporations to make us work harder?
There's no doubt fulfillment in the workplace is a relatively new concept. When I entered the workforce back in the seventies, I felt entitled to have a job I'd find interesting - but that's a long way short of "fulfilling". And my father had no sympathy with my insistence that I had to like my job: to his generation, work was just a necessary evil, to put food on the table.
For both my parents' generation and me, real life was outside the office. We worked hard, but only from 9 to 5. Most people worked closer to home so there were more leisure hours. When I started work, there was even a move towards shorter hours and longer holidays.
In the last twenty years or so, many things have changed. Our working hours are longer - I officially work 40 hours a week instead of 35, and on top of that, the edges are blurred. We can no longer take an undisturbed coffee or lunch break, because our mobile phone or Blackberry goes with us. Many of us go into work early or leave late to keep up (or because it's expected). Even if we don't, those who do work early are liable to call us and expect an answer, regardless of whether we're in the shower, eating breakfast or on the train to work.
When we are at work, we're being squeezed into smaller and smaller spaces, with fewer and lower barriers between us, until our workplaces start to look strangely like those old black-and-white photos of serried ranks of desks in Victorian offices a hundred years ago.
Meanwhile, the Human Resources Departments are spruiking how wonderful these new arrangements are - being cheek by jowl with our workmates promotes "teamwork" and "camaraderie", and our work is "challenging" and "fulfilling". Am I the only one who feels that the more our employers treat us like battery hens, to be squeezed for every extra egg, the more they talk about how well they're looking after us and how great our jobs are?
Often we are willing participants in the game - we have to believe our jobs can be fulfilling, otherwise we wouldn't be able to endure the long hours of work, plus the long hours of commuting, and the resulting disappearance of our leisure time. If our current job isn't fulfilling, then it's worth hanging in there in the hope we'll get promoted into one that IS fulfilling. We've learned to substitute socialising with our workmates and online for socialising with friends and family in the outside world, and we think that's normal.
If it works for you, then that's fine. But the downside is that many people never find that "fulfilling" job. And they've grown up being told that they're entitled to expect it - so they're going to spend their lives with a sense of disappointment or failure, which is completely needless.
It's an old saying but true - we should be working to live, not living to work.
