Workology

As part of its ongoing research into Changing Work Attitudes in Britain, Workology has published its first nationwide survey into work attitudes in conjunction with market research agency, Populus.

Results indicate that over half of the UK’s 30million professionals no longer trust big corporate brands to give them job security. The WKL Work Index finds that friends, family and peers are more trusted sources of work opportunities than large companies or the government.

For full details of the survey findings, please contact Sam Gyimah, CEO, Workology.com – samg@workology.com.

You will have heard by now, and no doubt read about Fiona Phillips leaving her breakfast telly job because , she says, she has , “finally discovered I can’t have it all.”

Well, not quite. The real problem for the mum of two was the four am starts, which lead to her being in a permanent foul, sleep deprived mood, only turning on the megawatt smile and chirpy blondness when the cameras were running.

While her departure has spawned hundreds of column inches on the perils of being a working mum, mostly by other working mums who write stuff about working in an office all day, then having to come home, pick up Lego bricks, make dinner, do laundry blah blah blah, my heart does not bleed for them, or for that matter, for Fiona. It’s not about “having it all” but about having good hours and a better work life balance. In short, it’s about Workology. She hasn’t quit the job to be a full time mum and carer. She’s quit it to pursue other jobs in telly with better working hours.

Fiona Phillips is very good at her job, and she will no doubt be offered many more telly jobs without 4am starts. She has a ( no doubt lucrative ) column in The Mirror, Gordon Brown has offered her a job (which she wisely turned down) and her husband earns a tidy bundle as a GMTV editor. Now, her main job is to prove that by working more sociable hours, she will indeed revert to being a nicer wife and mum- not snappy and permanently tired.

She noted on a five week holiday that her husband was pleased to get the old , cheerful Fiona back, but, er, that was on holiday. Back in real life, even working more sensible hours, Fiona still might get tired and grumpy. She’ll still have work, her kids to look after, her sick father to care for, and , to go by what she reports herself, her husband to spend time with: she writes that he feels like a lodger, that she never has time for him.

While some might regard that detail as frank to the point of indelicacy, I admire her candour, saying she is too tired to enjoy her lovely husband, children and house. But, having blamed all that is wrong on her mad hours, she will be compelled to enjoy all those things once her hours feel right for her.  Good luck to her.

Her argument that having it all means doing it all is old hat. What she should be focusing on is how hard she has worked and the payoff for that hard work, which is now being in a position to dictate her hours, her wages, and work life balance. But that wouldn’t do, because it would be seen to be blowing her own trumpet, and her thing is guilt and self deprecation, which she probably feels more working women can relate to.

Lorraine Kelly was unintentionally (we hope) damning Philips with faint praise when she texted her “All the wives are upset you are going.” Whose wives, exactly? It doesn’t matter. She’ll soon be back on telly in some relatively cushy daytime spot, having, in the Workology way of things, negotiated better hours for better than decent money.

What’s your situation? Have years of doing rubbish hours put you in a stronger negotiating position to work more sociable hours?  Do you think working mums have it any harder than working dads, in the modern world?

This week’s poll:

Summer holidays are over, but isn’t it great to be back to work, back to the job for which you feel utmost passion and 100%  commitment? I mean, why did you even need a holiday? Why leave, even for one week, that job you love so much?  Unless, of course, you don’t feel passionate about your job, but just pretended to in order to get the job.  

“Passion” is the big lie of the job interview. But it’s a lie we are all complicit in perpetuating but because it feeds into the corporate mindset. It’s not enough to want to do a good job, a great job , even, and make a decent living. You have to love your job, marry it and have it’s babies.

So says journalist and author  Philip Delves Broughton in  What They Teach You At Harvard Business School (Penguin). The word “passion” in the corporate world makes him see red. He recounts a moment during an  interview  for a corporate job in publishing, after the interviewer said that  they are looking for people who are “really smart, passionate and committed.” 

He writes: “I wanted to grab this monster by the neck and scream into her yellowing eyeballs, ‘And what are you going to do with all these smart, passionate, committed people?  Plug them into your dull, trivial culture and waste their lives on the hamster wheel of corporate life? ‘” 

Broughton has a big problem, as I do, with the word “passion” , as applied to the workplace. I just think it is overused, but he goes further and speculates that it’s a form of “corporate coercion”- that it is not enough to do a job for financial reward, that you have to fake passion even if you find the work meaningless and unsatisfying, because if you admit to being passionate about work, there is no excuse to go home and live some other life, because work is your “passion.” 

He says everyone uses this word in the corporate world. “Business outsourcing is my passion.” You would have to feel a bit sorry for the sad person who says this. 

BUT, Broughton’s best point about this word is that passion is a fleeting sensation, but that this fleeting sensation  is meant to endure in the exciting world of commerce. He asks, what will be after our passion for passion? He jokes, “We bring a panting, sexual intensity to our work., ” or  ” a stalkerish obsession with financial performance.” 

The bottom line is that if you are that obsessed with work, something else goes out of whack- family life, relationships, fun.  One of his fellow students calls the school a “factory for unhappy people”  but that seems an overly bleak assessment. Being passionate about your work, for real, is not necessarily  a ticket to divorce court, rehab or the psychiatrist.

It’s more realistic to say that if you do have to fake passion, better to fake it for lots of money than not very much.  But it would be better still if we didn’t have to fake it at all.

Have you had to fake passion in your career? Any words in the corporate jargon that really grate? Do you think if you use words like passion enough, you actually start to brainwash yourself.

Have you ever had a crush on a ‘dumb’ job? Something that takes up a lot less brain space and lot less stress than your current high-pressured profession? You’re not alone.

Many professionals fantasize about doing a job that seems easier and nicer than their own, a job in an environment where everybody seems happy. “Wouldn’t it be nice to work in a cake shop,” says the head buyer of a major department store who is regularly putting in 13 hour days and taking work home. “Everybody is happy in cake shop. If I worked in a cake shop, I could have my cake and eat it too!”

“Wouldn’t it be nice to be a Turkish barber,” wonders a stressed out systems analyst who is neither Turkish nor handy with the razors. “Everybody is happy at the Turkish barbers, all those men dozing under their hot towels.”

Well, dream on, stress bunnies, because quitting a stable but high pressure job to make cakes or shave other bloke’s stubble is not the easier option you might think it is. When the going gets tough, the tough don’t get going. They stay put. They know the cake or barbershop scenario looks great from the customer perspective. In reality, it would be less money, probably more physically demanding work, and to the outside world of co workers in your field, you will look like you’ve a) fallen on hard times or b) had some sort of breakdown.

But there is another breed of dissatisfied worker who hasn’t quite done the maths of professional extreme down shifting. This worker escapes to the heaven of the local greasy spoon at lunchtime, a joint invariably staffed by young, smiling, eager to please kids or genial, avuncular older men with Italian accents There is the welcome hiss of the Gaggia machine, cheerful but not too loud pop music, and happy, hungry chatty people bent over steaming plates of spaghetti. There is friendly banter, talk of holidays, and such a warm , cosy, maternal feel to the place, coupled with all that nursery food, it’s like a womb with a view.

So nice, in fact, that it would probably be a great place to work. How hard can it be? Make some sandwiches, pour coffee, slice cake, natter with the customers, who you will come to regard as friends. Sure, there would be cut in pay, but you’d get free lunch every day, and wouldn’t it be worth it for the never having to answer to that slave driver of a boss again. After the lunch time rush, you could probably just sit at a table, eat cake and do the crossword.

Except you couldn’t , because you’d have to clean the tables, wash the dishes, mop the floor, refill the salt, pepper, ketchup and vinegar dispensers and do lots of other chores you’d never think about in your fantasy job because it would wreck the fantasy.

Well, wake up and smell the Swiss water process decaff, guys. A hard time at work is a hard time at work and you’ll get through it. It’s great to follow your dream, but if you dream is for a simpler working life , a job where you think you don’t have to “think”, think again!

What are your “dumb” job fantasies? Have you ever jacked in trading shares to flip burgers and found it a deeply rewarding experience?

Tell us your stories.

Google yourself lately? No, I mean, in the last couple of hours? How was it for you?

Is popping your name into a search engine the acceptable face of self obsession, a bit of harmless ‘inter-bating’, or do you prefer to see it as a useful way of monitoring your web presence and work prospects?

The answer lies somewhere in-between. Depending on the mood of the self-searcher, looking for the size of your presence on the web can either temporarily bolster or batter one’s self esteem, or give you a glimpse into how others (including prospective work contacts) see you, or mistake you for someone else.

Not long after Google was up and running, a friend implored me to Google myself. It sounded rude and sexual so I hung up on him. But after a clarifying phone call, I gave it a try and found out that I was really, really rich, married to someone called Steven with whom I had set up a philanthropic organisation bearing our names, and had a nice , neat bob instead of mass of unruly curls. There was loads and loads written about me and my fabulous, philanthropic life.

Then there was this other person with my name and there was only one reference to her. She slagged off a single by The Smiths in a very old edition of the NME. Obviously a bitter and twisted nobody, not a patch on the Californian zillionaire.

Yes, an amusing case of mistaken web identity (have you figured out which one I am yet?) but it illustrates a good point for Workologists: Is the web presence version of you an accurate reflection of who you are , what you do and , more to the point, what you can do for others who might pay you handsomely to do it, or does it open the door to reveal some embarrassing and best forgotten skeletons in your www.iusedtobeabitofaprat.com cupboard?

A new search aggregator called Addict-o-Matic, which I initially thought was a joke alarm type device that would set off sirens every time you searched your own name, is a useful new addiction to the other search engines because it returns results from social networks such as Facebook as well as other sources. In the current job market, web presence matters in a big way and it is just as important that your one does not work against you as it does promote your USPs.

An article from the New York Times archive - highlights how an online persona can undermine a great resume. It tells how an potential intern candidate for a Chicago consulting firm described his interests (on Facebook) as ” smoking blunts, shooting people and obsessive sex” Needless to say the guy didn’t get the gig. What might be funny and outrageous to one group of people can really put off people in the working world.

What is your experience? Does your web presence help or hinder your business?

Here are the results to last week’s question, In your working life, what would you find the most scary to do?

This week’s poll: 

What other things do you want from your working life? Tell us what drives you.

What is a white and “acceptable lie” in the workplace – “a porkie”; and what is a downright lie for which an employee should probably get sacked?

The Belfast Telegraph has reported that fake sick notes are being sold on www.doctorsnotestore.com to healthy people who want to bunk off work.  They’re available for Ireland, the UK and Australia.  The authentic-looking documentation bears real doctors’ names, but has no official link to sick notes given by GPs to patients unable to work.   The notes retail for €29.99 and are meant to be a novelty product, but the website’s testimonial section quotes one customer as saying: “I have been using your fake doctors’ note service for five years, now I get an extra two weeks’ holiday every year.”

Clearly, abusing sick notes is overstepping the mark.  It undermines the principle of the doctor-patient relationship. But – let’s be honest – we’ve all told some sort of fib at work to get out of something we didn’t want to do.

What porkies have you told at work? Where would you draw the line?

[in keeping with the theme, you can enter a fake name and email address if you want to remain anonymous!]

There is something profoundly depressing – or cheering, depending on your point of view – about watching a guy who can recite great tracts of Milton ringing up a random person and say, “Do you own your own home?”

Have you ever taken an in-between job at, say, a call centre? They’re stuffed with people with degrees in theatre arts, dance, media studies, philosophy, art history, English literature. But, for many of those degree holders, their call-centre career ain’t a stopgap. Research shows that three years after completing their courses, 40% of graduates are in jobs that don’t require a degree.

I’m actually part of that stat. I’m now a journalist, despite studying for a degree in Education [but only taught for one year, having discovered that small children in the confines of a classroom are like normal children, only psychotic]. So, this begs the question, whither study? University of Ludlow or University of Life?

While the government is urging more young people to pursue higher education – so many of their role models – Branson, Beckham, Oliver, did not get degrees. And not all employers think that degree holders have the kind of skills that matter in the working world. A CBI study on employment trends found that 20% of employers thought degree holders lacked skills in communication, problem solving, team working and IT. That’s not even factoring in the inverted snobbery of MDs and other top bosses who left school at 16 and it “never did them any ‘arm.” In my trade, journalism, trying to get on a newspaper on the back of a media studies degree is social and professional suicide. There’s a lot more respect for the kid who left school at 16 to do an internship on the local rag.

And, why not when you hear that the University of Nottingham announced a few years ago that it was offering an MA programme in Robin Hood studies? It’s loads more complicated than, “He stole from the rich, he gave to the poor” – apparently. Other degrees bound to raise a smirk in the company of status seekers are golf course management, circus arts, stand up comedy and the most recent offering from Sussex University – bee-keeping. This last one – apiculture, if you want to get fancy about it – has wider applications than you might think. They say by studying how bees live, we can learn about health, better public transport systems and peaceful living- good thing for say, a mayor or Prime Minister to know.

That said, there is no doubting a First from a top university is going to open doors for you, but how many of us with not so exulted degrees have used them in our working lives..?

Have you? Has your degree even been a bit of a handicap in your working life, in terms of other people’s perception of you?

What are the scariest work situations you’ve found yourself in? Tell us your stories.