“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” said God to Adam, “till thou return unto the ground.” And for much of history that’s what work, for most people, was all about — pain, degradation and drudgery. Indeed, ponos, the ancient Greeks’ word for work, actually meant “pain.”
It took centuries — until the emergence of the Protestant work ethic — for work to be seen as dignified and moral; something of a duty, even. And it took a few more, until our very own information age and the optimism of some economic good times, for the idea to emerge that a job might actually be fulfilling and enjoyable in itself.
Now, of course, assuming you are lucky enough to have a job, the relationship has changed again. By force of circumstance, as the first global recession of the 21st century really begins to bite, your job may suddenly look much more important than it has done for many years.
During the boom in the UK, there may have been years when your house earned nearly as much as you did (at least on paper, anyway). Stock options and a steadily expanding pension pot left some employees feeling that the thing they did at the office every day was secondary to their financial wellbeing.
For a certain very favoured class in the 1990s and early noughties, what mattered most was the accumulation of property and capital. And for many more, certainly if they were homeowners in areas of the country where house prices were rising fast, the future did not appear anything to be afraid of. If the worst came to the worse, we could always downsize, couldn’t we? Cut down, move out, maybe commute in for a couple days a week. All things were possible: we had a cushion.
Even if your job has always been what occupational psychologists describe as a meaningful and important part of your life, you might have felt infected by a general mood of optimism, and felt a greater willingness to take risks, be flexible, consider changes mid-stream — a sense, in short, of possibility.
Not any more. Now, all of a sudden, most people’s homes are worth a lot less, maybe even less than they have borrowed to pay for them (particularly if they remortgaged). Savings and pension pots have shrunk dramatically, by up to a third. The national mood has swung, dramatically. And jobs — those things we pretty much took for granted — are starting to look very precious indeed.
“For plenty of people out there, the attitude to work has been a bit like teenage boys towards their girlfriends: there are a lot of them about, I don’t really need to worry, I’ll be all right,” said John Philpott, chief economist at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. “Now everyone is realizing it’s time to settle down. It’s a reality check.”
That check affects different people in different ways, said Neil Conway of the London-based School of Management and Organisational Psychology at Birkbeck College, London — but it usually means our relationships with our bosses are undergoing a marked power-shift.
“Many people will be putting more into their jobs now,” he said. “Statistically, it’s pretty well established that when unemployment starts to climb, absenteeism falls. There’s a tendency towards ingratiating behavior, too — groveling, basically, in an attempt to make yourself indispensable.”
With daily stories of huge numbers of applicants for any new job, there may also be a distinct preference for security.
“You may well think twice about applying for a job with that buzzy, creative small start-up now,” Conway said. “A job with the council may start to look a lot more appealing. The thing about a recession is that it makes people really experience their job insecurity. Of course, no employee is ever really safe. But in recent years, a lot of people have felt they have been.”
And this, said Philpott, may lead employees to retreat into their shell.
“That’s the survivor syndrome — those who do keep their jobs still feel depressed by the fact that they’re feeling insecure and that their colleagues are departing,” he said. “Whereas some will respond by working harder, others will fall into resignation and depression, and start doing their jobs more reluctantly and half-heartedly.”
Philpott also believes the oft-cited idea that a recession provides an opportunity to re-evaluate careers and attitudes is mostly “bollocks. For every person who thinks, yes, there might be a better life and I’ve never been arsed to look for it but perhaps now is the moment, there will be nine who experience a recession as deeply depressing, distressing and a nightmare. It’s only a very few members of the professional classes who are likely to actually benefit from reduced working hours or unpaid sabbaticals. Book leave and all that — it’s a bit of a joke, really. There’ll be a lot of crap books coming out of this recession, you can count on that.”
Conway’s Birkbeck colleague, Rob Briner, said he has been surprised at the apparent quiescence of many 21st century employees faced with the prospect of their own redundancy.
“A lot of people felt safe, and now they feel unsafe,” he said. “But the response isn’t the same as in the mid-80s. The unions nowadays don’t have the same authority, and there’s a whole new generation who don’t know how to represent themselves.”
“People are taking it all rather passively. Over the last 20 years, they’ve bought into the idea of an individual deal with their employer and the notion that rewards are for performance. They seem inclined to accept a pay cut or redundancy as being in the natural order of things,” he said.
The “psychological contract” that binds employer and employee is changing, Conway believes.
“The explicit deal, the one that says I’ll work X number of hours for you each week and you’ll pay me Y number of dollars, is underpinned by a kind of implicit deal in which the employee also expects job security, respect, career opportunities, that kind of thing,” Conway said. “Job insecurity makes people examine that a lot more closely.”
If an employee is seen as talented and appreciated, he or she may have more clout than ever in a downturn. In the 1990s, said Philpott, “the management narrative was all about being lean and mean. So the employee response was to be lean and mean too; to offer zero commitment. The reaction to that, as we returned to full employment in the mid-90s, was for employers to concentrate far more on keeping employees engaged, interested, motivated.”
That, Briner said, may make companies behave rather more circumspectly than they have in past recessions.
“An organization wants to keep its best employees,” he said, “because they are the people who are going to help it pull through. But if its best employees see that organization behaving shabbily, they’re not going to want to stay around.”
The crisis, some experts say, is also reviving the concept of human capital: Adam Smith’s notion of the inherent value of the education, training and experience we each acquire over a working life. But that capital is no longer constituted simply of its traditional components — a good school, a good degree, many years of experience in a particular field.
“What employers want from their work-force now,” said Angela Carter of Sheffield University’s Institute of Work Psychology, “is employability and skills. Work is becoming more complex.”
So the employees who will survive the current recession best, Carter believes, are those who succeed in escaping what she calls the “occupational work silo”: people who think in terms of what they can do across an organization, rather than what they have done in their job to date.
“We’re in a really interesting power balance at the moment,” she said. “Employers want more for less, and employees want more control. It’s all about you as a worker taking control; if you’ve got what an organization wants, you can find yourself in a very good position.”
A recession-appropriate CV, Carter says, should not be a bald list of qualifications and experiences, but “all about your skills. It should be: ‘This is what I can do, I solved this problem last year’, not, ‘I’ve got this qualification and I’ve been with that company for 15 years.’ If you’re an extraordinary communicator, a manager who can talk both to the board and to your team, that’s what people want to know.”
Carter, who was made redundant from the UK health service in 1993, suggests the ideal working pattern to see off the recession is, in theory at least, to avoid having all your eggs in one work basket by becoming what she calls a “portfolio worker,” so that no one employer has the power to put you on the dole.
“Although that’s not for everyone,” she said. “It all depends on your stability needs: some people need stability a lot more than others, and will seek it where they can find it.”
Whatever our response at work to the deepening recession, it is still true to say that many of us are better placed to deal with its consequences than our counterparts of 20 or more years ago.
According to Peter Totterdell of the Institute of Work Psychology in Sheffield, northern England, “People have less expectation of lifelong employment from a single organization than two decades ago, and may be more used to crafting their own career paths by jumping between employers. New technology also means that people have more tools at their disposal for examining alternative paths, for making new contacts.”
If you are lucky enough to be wondering what your job really means to you these days, however, it’s probably best, given the choice, not to try finding out just now.
For those made redundant in a recession, Totterdell concludes, the problems are “just the same as those identified a couple of decades ago: loss of daily structure, loss of purpose, loss of important relationships. For many, unemployment will be a very new experience. They will not have the necessary networks to help them navigate it.”
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