What is “work”?

“Work is about the search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as for cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”

Studs Terkel (1974)

Have you ever stopped to really think about this thing we call “work”? I don’t know about you, but pretty much all of my schooling was geared around what I was going to do “when I grew up”. And, growing up in a working class suburb of Glasgow, the Calvanistic work ethos was embedded in my whole way of being. Then, work meant getting a job. And, given that the official Scottish unemployment rate when I graduated in 1982 was something like 22%, a job – any job – was something to feel lucky about.

In the UK at least, work defines us. It’s how we introduce ourselves. “I’m a (blah)…” we say, proudly if we’re happy about it, and with embarrassment if we’re not. Knowing what people do allows us to put them in a box where we can understand them. “He’s an accountant, therefore he’s boring.” “He’s a banker, therefore he’s rich – though maybe not so rich currently as he once was!”

I used to have an Italian boyfriend with whom I spent much time in Italy. It was disorienting for me that, there, few people ever asked me what I did. They were more interested in knowing about me. But who was I without being able to brag about being the director of my own consulting company?

My partner, Steve, and I run workshops called “Tough at the Top” for senior people who have come to some sort of career or life crossroads and are asking themselves questions about their work. As part of a process of helping them recalibrate and change focus, we ask them questions about what work means for them; why they do it. They share some great things:

1. “I always wanted to do what I do now.” Many people talk about having, if you like, a vocational interest in what they do that goes back, in some instances, to teenage or even childhood years. Many people, even at points of transition, recognise for themselves that there was always something about the career path they followed that was appealing to them.
2. “I get a sense of achievement and satisfaction from my work.” A lot of people who work in senior job roles talk about the experience they have of doing something that makes a mark somehow; that makes them feel good about themselves.
3. “At work, I get a sense of being connected to something much bigger than me.” It’s a common one: people often feel part of a community at work. They feel that, through identification with the brand name and the company of which they are part, they can do more than they are able to as an individual contributor.
4. “I am paid well.” Funnily enough, money is not always the first thing out of people’s mouths when you ask them why they do what they do. But it’s normally on the list somewhere. Because, for most of us, work is the vehicle through which we earn money, which, let’s face it, is the currency we need to fund whatever else we want from life.

Which brings me on to some of the, well, let’s say, more murky reasons why people work. Reasons that, as they negotiate some form of work transformation for themselves, whatever that looks like, tend to make the whole thing stickier than it might be:

1. “I need the money.” My lifestyle, they go on to say, is now such that I need to work, and earn very well, in order to keep funding it. Mortgages, second homes, cars, school fees, childcare, holidays, spouses who don’t work and whose lifestyles I support… I am handcuffed to my current job. I dare not do anything different, no matter how much I really rather would.
2. “I work to keep up with the demands of my job.” This an interesting one. Often when you probe a bit further, what people are really admitting to here, without using these words, of course, is a kind of addiction to work. These people, not to be confused with the genuinely in-love with their work kinds who can be consumed by what they are doing for hours without realising it, have formed a deeply unhealthy relationship with work. In fact, work often turns out to be the key relationship in their lives. I should know as I was this soldier. My addiction to work at one time caused me a marriage: I was so caught up in working sixteen hour days that I hardly ever saw my husband, and when I did I was recovering my energy for the next onslaught.
3. “What else would I do without this job?” Sometimes, they say, I think of doing something different. But what? Their jobs have become a safe place, something they resent, but can’t leave, fearful of the prospect of redefining themselves and perhaps finding that, underneath the suit there’s some hollow person with nothing worthwhile to offer the world. And that’s a pretty scary place to be.

What many of us don’t realise is that, in doing our big corporate jobs, we have bought into a system that by and large supports our increasingly out-moded, Post-Industrial Revolution economy. It’s a system that defines what work is through its lens, which tends to go along the lines of being employed by a “name”; having a job title, the bigger the better; getting a salary, a regular amount of money that magics its way into our bank accounts each month; and the benefits that go with it. With this often comes an implicit expectation of servitude; that you’re an employee and you’re here to serve “the business”, which means that you must expect at times to be treated like shit. And it’s a system that works for many, but by no means for all. Some of the more enlightened employers are switched on to thinking about the role people play in their business, but even so, it’s a woeful few who actually crack it.

Stand back and ask yourself:

• What does work mean for me?
• What do I get from it, good and bad?
• How is that for me?

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