Should you care what other people think of your job?
 

Photo: Kevin Rosseel   

Walking down a street in a Tokyo commercial district some years ago, I passed one of the innumerable company buildings as the early-evening rush home was beginning. In the lobby of the building, two portly, middle-aged men in vaguely military uniforms were standing at attention facing one another.

As far as I could make out, one of them was saying “Everything is in good shape; I entrust the safety of the building to your care.” Then they snapped each other a smart salute, before the day shift man went home.

A typical western reaction might well be pity, mixed with a little contempt. Imagine taking a job like a night security-guard seriously: poorly paid, little status, and, in a part of Tokyo where hardly anyone lived and there was almost no crime, apart from the odd drunk urinating against a window.

Does value only lie in the eye of the beholder?

And yet, and yet. It’s a strange thing that, in our society, we frequently judge our jobs not by what we think of them, but what others think . A ‘good’ job is one that impresses others with its status, its baubles (travel, car, expense account, large office) and, most of all, with the amount of money it pays. We are taught that rewards are primarily external to the job itself; that job satisfaction does not really matter that much in comparison; and that we may well have to put up with jobs we dislike, if they pay well or have other advantages.

At work too, superiors typically assess our value by external factors: how much money we make for a company; how quickly we get rid of clients at call-centers; what percentage of queries are answered in such-and-such a time.

This article isn’t another kick aimed at the twitching corpse of quantitative measures of performance. It’s a expression of bemusement that organizations today pay so little attention to the satisfaction that people get from their jobs. Somewhere in a Powerpoint presentation somewhere there may be something about ‘excellence’—and no doubt somebody has been heard to say at least once that “people are our most important asset”—yet it’s a shame that organizations don’t behave as though either were true; especially since happy organizations where people are fulfilled in what they do are much more successful and, in the case of the private sector, more profitable.

Whose line is it anyway?

Wait a moment. Don’t you have some choice in this? Why should you let others decide how important your jobs is? In the end, surely it’s what you think that’s important.

Many people do hard, unlovely, even dangerous jobs, which are poorly paid and have low status. But we’d be in trouble without coal miners, deep sea fishermen and those who get up at 4.00 AM every day to pilot the planes and drive the trains and deliver the mail. You may think being a cleaner in a hospital is about as low-status a profession as you can get, a job only fit for the least able workers and illegal immigrants, but millions of people around the world would die every year in hospitals without someone to remove the dirt and the germs.

Where value really lies

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what others think of your job, or even whether you yourself think it’s important. What matters is how you approach it.

A good organization encourages you to have pride in the quality of what you do. Even in a bad organization, there’s nothing that stops you developing that pride yourself.

You can do this best by a single-minded concentration on every detail of the job. It’s what great athletes have apparently always done; it’s also at the root of all the Zen disciplines, which take mundane tasks, like making tea, and ritualise them into art forms. It’s a way of giving importance and dignity to everything you do, and therefore to yourself as well—like the two security guards I watched that evening in Tokyo.

Meditation at work

Concentrating on carrying out every task as well as you possibly can produces something else too: a type of active meditation, where you lose consciousness of yourself and of your ego in your application to the task in hand. It’s what the psychologist Mihaily Csikszentmihalyi called “Flow”, although it’s been known to Buddhists and others for thousands of years.

Most of us experience it occasionally in our work or in our private lives. With me, it happens sometimes when I’m lecturing. Often it’s an effort to keep the attention of the audience, but sometimes everything clicks and I lose consciousness of everything except what I’m doing. The words come easily. I scarcely glance at my notes. I know I will finish within a minute or two of my allotted time, even without looking at my watch.

“Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,” wrote the English religious poet George Herbert, “makes that and the action fine.” Whether you’re sweeping a room, cleaning a hospital or acting as a night security guard, you have the choice of doing an average job or doing the best job you possibly can.

Whenever you do the best job you can, always—not for money or to impress others, but because it matters to you—you’ll be taking a few more essential steps in the direction of being happier at work.

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