

Hating What You Do - riffer
http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14586131

======
azanar
What I hope: the comments on this article don't become yet another conference
of blowhards and apologists.

The frequency at which I've seen comments paraphrased as "So you hate your
work; welcome to life, now shut up and get back to it," is disheartening. I am
surprised the number of people, even on HN, who see this mutual antagonism as
not just a self-fulfilling prophecy, but one that can and will sustain itself
indefinitely.

I honestly don't think it will. In fact, I think it already failed some time
ago, and we are feeling the effects of it right now.

The article brings up the number of people who are, or at least feel that they
are, stagnating at their current jobs. It also draws the connection between
the feeling stagnation and a reduction in productivity and competitiveness.
But stagnation isn't typically a temporally local phenomenon; a person does
not usually become redundant or stagnant overnight. However, their realization
that they are redundant or stagnating can occur overnight, often after
ignoring the warning signs for as long as they consciously can.

But productivity isn't just affected by the feeling of stagnation and
vulnerability; it is affected by the actual stagnation that an expectation of
mutual loyalty causes. The worker can become lazy with the expectation that
the employer will keep them on anyway, provided they aren't completely
incompetent. This is a considerable threat if the worker doesn't give a damn
about their work past the paycheck; what incentive do they have to be anything
but as lazy as possible. They were clinging on to their jobs before, but the
recession made them acutely aware that they were doing so and how tenuous
their grip has now become.

This apathy also negatively affects productivity and competitiveness. But no
one notices, because it is business as usual; at least it was. But now
employers have started to notice, but they are solving the wrong problem; they
assume the problem is one of insufficient data or insufficient supervision.
They never assume that one or more of their underlying assumptions about their
workforce, and what makes them most effective, might not be true and might
never have _been_ true.

I hope that people wake up to the larger lesson this turmoil is wanting to
teach all of us. Unproductive people working in what are effectively sinecures
are not a sustainable way to run an economy based on the production and
distribution of wealth. Eventually, someone will ask where all this wealth is,
and won't abide a waffling, noncommittal answer.

~~~
Confusion
_the actual stagnation that an expectation of mutual loyalty causes_

So you're basically advocating that employers and employees should not be
loyal to each other, so there won't be any feelings or expectations of loyalty
that can negatively impact productivity. That completely ignores the positive
effects of loyalty, which are well documented.

You're being an armchair economist, that has identified a single relationship
that he uses to explain everything.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
_advocating that employers and employees should not be loyal to each other_

Unfortunately I have yet to personally see an example of a corporation being
loyal in my lifetime. On the contrary I have seen the trust of family members
abused by their employers.

I do believe in positive effects of loyalty, but that loyalty can only
function when it is mutual. The reality I have seen for myself and my family
is that corporate loyalty does not exist. Individual humans can be well-
intentioned but organizational behavior is the ultimate arbiter of the
relationship.

One definite misfortune of the current state is that the power relationship
between employer and employee is unbalanced. In theory that relationship is a
capitalistic trade of time for money, but the severing of that relationship is
far more disruptive to the individual. I think much of the resentment found
among employees results from the loser's choice between a poor employment
situation and the uncertainty and upheaval of changing employers.

Only I can take responsibility for my own well-being.

Edit: The one counterexample I have seen is SAS. That privately-owned company
treats its employees extremely well. Its turnover rate is also nonexistent.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_In theory that relationship is a capitalistic trade of time for money, but
the severing of that relationship is far more disruptive to the individual._

Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. A startup I'm consulting for recently
lost an employee, and it hurt us far more than the employee.

In general, a recurring trade creates wealth. Ending the trade tends to hurt
whoever is getting the lion's share of the wealth created. In the case of
unionized workers, that tends to be the employee. In the case of high value
workers, that tends to be the employer.

------
yummyfajitas
On the topic of France Telecom, 24 suicides in about 18 months is a shocking
number being used by unions and activists to make their case.

It's shocking that they could be so dishonest by presenting a statistically
normal suicide rate as high. The suicide rate in france is 26.1/100,000 for
men and 9.4/100,000 for women. France Telecom has about 100,000 employees, so
in 18 months we'd expect about 26 suicides (assuming it's 50% men, 50% women).

[http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suicider...](http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suiciderates/en/)

Further context: most of the workers at France Telecom can't be laid off and
are simply being moved from one job to another as part of a reorg. This causes
stress, because workers might have to learn something new! Sacre bleu!

A chart of working hours by nation (look who is 4'th from the bottom):

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yearly_working_time_2004.j...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yearly_working_time_2004.jpg)

------
cojadate
I'm glad to see the Economist raise this subject. I've known so many people
who hate their jobs, it really does seem like it should be higher up on the
political agenda than it is.

This article brings up two particularly interesting points for me.

Firstly, do performance measures increase productivity? Apparently, they
actually decrease productivity, at least if productivity involves creative
problem-solving: <http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html>

Secondly, can standard corporations genuinely recognize and implement the
'human side' of management, as the article says they should. I would argue
not. The standard corporation is owned by a large number of shareholders with
no personal connection to the corporation and no interest in anything other
than profiting from their shares. Because of this arrangement, it is
inevitable that profit is the only value that counts in corporate management.
If management adopts a 'touchy-feely' approach it can only be justified if
this is found to increase profits, and it would do nothing to prevent their
being discarded as soon as it becomes profitable to do so. A genuine
recognition of the 'human side' of management would be a recognition that
humans are ends in themselves, not means to an end. But in a standard
corporate structure, employees are inevitably just cogs in a profit-making
machine.

~~~
weaksauce
Thanks for the TED link. I agree with the statement that Dan states in the
video about results oriented work spaces. I would like (more) to work for a
company that offers this as part of the corporate culture. I think it can only
work in the context of managers that can actually set realistic goals though
which seems to be tough in software development.

------
swombat
Serious advice: if you feel suicidal because of a company reorg, _DO NOT_
start a start-up.

~~~
percept
Another consideration may be failure on one's own terms, versus being fired on
a whim:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness_economics>

~~~
swombat
If a company reorg (something most competent people can navigate without too
much stress) makes you suicidal, I'd say that the wealth of impending
disasters in a start-up (only some of which feel under your control most of
the time) will drive you insane much more quickly.

------
brown9-2
However you might feel about the topic, 24 work-related suicides at a single
company in just two years is staggering. Do any US companies have statistics
like this?

~~~
Xixi
France Telecom has 187,331 employees (wikipedia). It might be "a single
company", but it's 9 times bigger than Google...

Even if you restrict it to France (where I think these suicides occured),
that's still roughly 100,000 employees, so 5 times Google.

Of course it's sad and France Telecom should definitely improve the situation.
Not a single employee should commit suicide because of work. But it's not
staggering.

France suicide rate is somewhere around 17 or 18 in 100,000.

