"Rethinking Work"

"Gallup regularly polls workers around the world to find out. Its survey last year found that almost 90 percent of workers were either “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” from their jobs. Think about that: Nine out of 10 workers spend half their waking lives doing things they don’t really want to do in places they don’t particularly want to be...

About 15 years ago, the Yale organizational behavior professor Amy Wrzesniewski and colleagues studied custodians in a major academic hospital. Though the custodians’ official job duties never even mentioned other human beings, many of them viewed their work as including doing whatever they could to comfort patients and their families and to assist the professional staff members with patient care. They would joke with patients, calm them down so that nurses could insert IVs, even dance for them. They would help family members of patients find their way around the hospital.

The custodians received no financial compensation for this “extra” work. But this aspect of the job, they said, was what got them out of bed every morning...

there is still little evidence of this satisfaction-efficiency trade-off. In fact, most evidence points in the opposite direction. In his 1998 book, “The Human Equation,” which reviewed numerous studies across dozens of different industries, the Stanford organizational behavior professor Jeffrey Pfeffer found that workplaces that offered employees work that was challenging, engaging and meaningful, and over which they had some discretion, were more profitable than workplaces that treated employees as cogs in a production machine...

In the face of longstanding evidence that routinization and an overemphasis on pay lead to worse performance in the workplace, why have we continued to tolerate and even embrace that approach to work?...Money does not tap into the essence of human motivation so much as transform it. When money is made the measure of all things, it becomes the measure of all things."
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/opinion/sunday/rethinking-work.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region&_r=0

ugh capitalism. We are not purely economic animals.


I think that the thesis in this piece can be very true. People can re-orient their dreams and aspirations to the reality that they live in - changing themselves instead of asking their situation to change.