December 2005 – Meaning at work

Approaching my fifth year of joblessness, I am still unable to find a satisfactory way to describe what I do. It wouldn’t worry me ordinarily and it doesn’t seem to worry most people I meet either, but these people all take for granted something I must confront almost every day – that I do not belong to any organisation.

Every time I enter a company to meet someone I must obtain a security pass that always asks for the name of my organisation. Every time I register for a web site I am presented with a long list of job descriptions or sector categories. There is never a box for the “don’t knows”. The best I can hope for is “other” which is equally depressing because I like to feel I belong in this world as much as anyone.

Once, when still on the staff of the FT, I was asked in the street by a market researcher - the sort who apportion people to an economic category – to describe what I did for a living. When it was clear that I did not fulfil a management role I soon found myself near the foot of the social hierarchy. Today I would probably fail to make the scale.

Does any of this matter? Well, yes it does. In a year that readers of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World would recognise as 142 AF (After Ford), the values of his world state – community, identity and stability – are looking hauntingly familiar. I do not want to be cast as an Epsilon-Minus. Neither would I feel comfortable as an Alpha-plus intellectual, yet I know such creatures are prized in business today where elitism is dominating the “forced ranking” policies of a number of big company management cadres.

Huxley’s book is sometimes described as a dystopia or satire yet when he wrote it he was by no means antagonistic to the idea of the ordered society and described stability as the “primal and ultimate need” of civilisation. Today stability has been replaced by the trendier concept of sustainability that is more about maintaining a natural order in the ecosystem.

Both approaches, however, demand an order of sorts. Perhaps there is some primal need for order that is reflected in the way people seek to find meaning in their work and a sense of belonging in the workplace.

A recent piece of research among 1,765 UK employees carried out by Penna*, the human capital management consultant, found that the relationship between a job and personal identity is stronger, the higher you rise in an organisation. This was reflected in the feedback from senior and older management far more than that from more junior and younger employees.

This understanding – that work is vital to the personal identity of employees - is so strong within senior management that most, when questioned, believed that all people working in their companies would have the same attitude. How wrong they were. Only a quarter of the under 25s questioned felt that their current role was important to their sense of identity.

This is because work holds so little meaning for many people in manual and low grade service jobs. One of my sons – an economics graduate – is doing some shop work for a large and well-respected chain over the Christmas period. Not only has the management already reneged on the understanding that he would work a 371/2 (thirty-seven and a half) hour week. It is also asking him to work until 10 pm every evening, including a late shift on Christmas Eve.

The shop manager, probably earning no great salary herself, is working the minimum week and leaving at 5.30pm during this busy period. It is difficult, as a father, to advise my son to stick with the job, when I know he is being exploited in such a merciless fashion. Shops used to have sensible opening hours. Now in our laissez faire and greedy society some shops are staying open longer in order to cater for disorganised people and the few deadbeats who have nothing else to do on Christmas Eve.

“I wouldn’t mind, dad,” he says. “But I have yet to receive a single word of thanks or encouragement from the manager.” He is the kind of young man who would go through hoops with the right encouragement. I feel for him.

I worked in shops myself back in the 1970s, but when I worked at weekends I was paid time-and-a-half on Saturdays and double-time on Sundays to make up for the inconvenience, and the manager mucked in with the rest of us.

We probably all know of employees who have been willing to commit themselves in extraordinary ways. Hayley Clark, working on the counter at Hertz, the car rental company, at Prestwick Airport, Scotland, took pity on an elderly Australian couple who brought their car back before flying on to Dublin.

She noticed they were still at the airport four hours later. They were flying the next day and had been unable to find a room anywhere because visitors to the nearby Open Gold Championship had taken every available space. So Ms Clark took them home, put them up for the night, then drove them to the airport for the 5am check-in time, all before starting her 8 am shift.

The story is used within Hertz as an illustration of exceptional company service. This and other stories have been teased out of the Hertz staff by The Storytellers, a Northampton-based consultancy that is using the power of narrative to help companies get across their management messages.

Alison Esse, director of The Storytellers, points out that we all communicate with each other by telling stories. It seems an obvious point, but one which is lost in the typical jargon-crowded Powerpoint presentation.

Hayley Clark’s story was not about great management at Hertz, but about basic individual human kindness – the sort you don’t see too often in systemised working patterns. So telling stories to staff about the good deeds of other staff would seem a good idea.

But staff in many companies have their own sometimes cynical stories, founded in frustration and simmering anger at unreasonable management expectations. These are the stories that managers do not like to hear. Staff are supposed to have positive attitudes, pulling together for the good of the company, the shareholders and the generous salaries of the senior executive team. These are the same executives who sometimes tell me that their companies do not need trade unions. No employee should need a trade union in a company that rewards people well and provides good working conditions. But unions will always have a role where companies think more of their profits than they do of their staff.

Penna is right to focus on meaning at work. I like to find meaning in my own work that need not be vested in a single employer, a fancy title or a salary. Companies have their own sense of meaning. If that is not shared by the workforce they have only themselves to blame.

*www.e-penna.com