This BLOG began to write itself immediately after the last, ‘The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work’.
A long-time friend sent me recollections of commuting in Wellington. He writes, “Dear Geoff, know what you mean by the rail peoples. It was just the same back in the 1950's, we would board a freezing cold 1930 style carriage at Taita and usually after two stops our then "group" was complete, two sets of facing seats. I got my first girl-friend that way, it did not work out but that is the way of such things is it not?
Later with Jane and I from Porirua the same thing happened. One of the train guards was so fond of Jane that when I told him she had died he burst into tears!!! He had problems with a lady who got on at Plimmerton on Mondays to go into town to live in an apartment there and always tried to pay him with a $50 bill for the single trip. That usually meant she got a freebie as he could never make the change. One day we had the cash from a church gala and gave him enough so he could give her change all in 20c pieces!!! That was the last time she tried that.”
There has since been a lot of comment about the commuter who just did her job and went home feeling nobody noticed she had been there. It appears to have been an astounding revelation. One reader noted, “In some ways it’s sad that people don’t enjoy it (work). You should really see your work place like family, you spend more time there than at home. Then again some families don’t get along at all.”
The research about the benefits of a positive working culture is vast and in fact comes into the category of being a no brainer. But just how responsible is the employer to provide staff with their ‘Happy Place’ and what is the individual’s responsibility? How might you respond to someone who felt that it was not their responsibility to help develop a positive culture in their organisation? Perhaps as a friend suggested… ‘Let's have a strategy to be the worst place to work. Let's try to beat the Lybian military model. We can refit for appalling working conditions, drop wages, invent a totally new concept, I think we would call it industrial relations where we would win if we were so awful staff decided to withdraw their labour in protest. We could get rid of the coffee machines, have enforced start times, fixed morning and afternoon tea and lunch breaks and we could fire one person a week just for fun’.
For communities to work well, everyone involved has to contribute and take responsibility to ensure the community succeeds. It seems to me it is part of the deal of belonging. How can you ignore those responsibilities? Or perhaps in this age of focus on the individual, we are forgetting communal etiquette and simply don’t know how to behave?
In an article in The Independent (repeated in a Sunday Herald), Gerard Gilbert interviews Elizabeth McGovern who plays Lady Cora in the global TV hit Downton Abbey. Gilbert asks how she explains the show’s success. She explains, “My contemporary brain finds it very relaxing, looking at an age when everybody knows how to behave because the rules are very clear. There’s something very stressful about today’s world, when people are allowed to behave how they want. You’re always having to make choices and judgement calls about how to behave, whereas in the world of Downton Abbey everybody knows what’s expected of them.”
This represents the tussle I always experience, first with myself and then with the organisations in which I am working at the time. The earlier times when rules, policies, rank and status prevailed, choices were limited and not much thinking was involved – just check the rulebook/policy manual. I reject that and have advocated quite literally the burning of policy manuals and the establishment of a common code to run parallel with the organisation purpose. Such a model respects those who participate and they in turn not only take individual responsibility for their actions, but actively contribute to the maintenance and development of a positive culture.
In the Randstad World of Work report 2011/12 in New Zealand, the majority of employers surveyed say increasing workplace productivity and performance is their single biggest human capital challenge. They see it important to unlock workforce productivity. In the survey employees report moderate levels of happiness, and affirm the principles of meaningful work – recognition and flexicurity (flexibility and job security).
To achieve high performance employers will need to deploy the well-known strategies to engage their staff, to create their ‘happy place’ at work. But in my opinion, the winners will be those organisations which employ people who see they have a personal responsibility to build and maintain that happy place. Those who seek to be employed who do not have a refined sense of their personal responsibility in this ‘community’ should be avoided like the plague.
