“Ethics is not a subject, it’s a life put to the test in a thousand moments.” (after Paul Tillich)
Time and again I come across people searching for answers, for a sense of meaning in a seemingly meaningless time. Not since the period between the two great wars has humankind faced such an era of uncertainty. In the past five years, we have seen a series of assaults on the very fabric of civil society and the decline of the institutions that have served as pillars of that society has raised the collective levels of ire and uncertainty to a point where people start to question the very meaning of life itself.
As trust in the organisations that represent the most important instruments in our lives declines, people seek to hold onto something that will represent stability, that they can depend on, and that something is increasingly a sense of balance.
When I first started my public speaking career – as a very reluctant advocate for woman’s voice to be heard in the conversation around the future of organisations – my focus was on the nuts and bolts of organisational life. People wanted to hear and to make sense of the culture of the organisations they were committed to spending large slabs of their lives in. What were people’s values; were women’s values and men’s values different; was the glass ceiling real; how do you get ahead; can you indeed swim against the tide? The solutions I offered were practical and pragmatic; know yourself better; understand how your values affect the relationships you have with other people you work with; question the organisations stated values; be a voice in the conversation about how we do things around here; make the implicit explicit; ask the big questions about what gets rewarded and recognised; challenge the status quo.
As an organisational sociologist, I saw my role as the management of meaning in what had become a ‘dumbing down’ of organisational life. Ten years ago, the dominant paradigm was autocracy and patriarchy mixed with a paste of patronisation. Terms such as empowerment, consensus, collaboration and employee participation were bandied about by well-meaning managers and business owners who sought to reflect the changing social expectation of business by the appearance of change and progress. There were a number of leaders who went well beyond the rhetoric and did instigate real change but for many the language changed but not the behaviour.
And so, at the many conferences I addressed, the new breed of managers – many of them the emerging professional class of educated females – sought real meaning around this new vocabulary of business. “How do we do it?”, they would ask; “How do I bring about lasting change?” The focus was solidly inside the organisation and the intention was to create the sort of organisations that management gurus such as Drucker and Senge wrote about, to reproduce the soft cultures that the Handy’s and DeGeus’s talked of with passion and conviction, to mould high performing cultures reported in seminal works such as Built to Last and Good to Great.
But, since September 2001 there has been a seismic shift in spiritual emphasis. Today, the talk is all about balance. Work is no longer the single most important element in people’s lives, although it would be wrong to suggest that the organisation has diminished in importance. Quite the contrary, with the decline of community, as suggested by Puttnam and others, people are increasingly looking to the organisation as the centre of their world, the one safe place in a sea of turbulence that is most people’s lives today. Democracy has been dealt a severe blow by the excessive response to the events in New York; principles such as the basic freedoms enshrined in Western Democracy are seen as negotiable at best and, in the extreme, dispensable in the name of the third great war, the War on Terrorism. In the classic Orwellian tradition, Terror has become the fourth great civilisation, after America, Europe and Oceania, and it is simply their turn to be rained upon by the other three.
And so, people’s search for meaning has extended beyond the metaphorical factory walls into every aspect of their lives. By being given permission to explore the inner dimension of work they now seek answers to the outer dimension of the world beyond work and the integration of the whole; the question of balance. I recently had a conversation with a recruitment consultant about the changing values of candidates. I was advising a client on recruiting staff and offered to talk to a friend of mine who works in the search industry. She asked me all sorts of questions about the nature of the person my client wanted, mostly to do with competencies, qualifications, experience, personal qualities; that kind of thing. Then she asked “What does your friend’s firm do about work life balance?” Because this is a topic that has grown in importance in workplace studies over the last 2 years, I thought no more about it and rattled off that my client did not have a formal policy on it but were very sympathetic to employees who see it as important. Not wishing to squib on the question, I wanted to be honest and say that the firm hadn’t yet developed a formal policy but did offer a supportive culture and tried wherever possible to accommodate employees need for recreation, family care, flexible conditions, etc.
Then I thought, “Why did you ask that?” It’s simple, she said. “Most candidates today ask that question. I’m always surprised but it comes up time and again. Why do you think that’s so?” She asked me. I explained about the increasing number of studies into Gen X & Y and the fact that this generation, more than any that have gone before, lives very much in the now. Career, security, loyalty are things of the past for the new generation of workers and managers. Their value system is “If the system hasn’t been loyal to my parents, why should I be loyal to it?” Many have grown up in the shadow of unemployment. While the 60s and 70s were characterised by relative full employment, the 90s – when most of the current crop of young workers were in the teens – were characterised by recession, high interest rates, a housing slump and many thousands of people forced to downshift because of changed economic circumstances. For the first time, Western democracies witnessed a wholesale casualisation of their workforces and, while they may not have been responsible for its causes, many employers jumped at the chance of removing the onerous burden of employee benefits from their balance sheets. Little wonder, then, that Gen Y sees no further than the next two years.
But speaking of values, we are always amazed at how the concept has entrenched itself in the lexicon of modern society. The sad part is that it is now co-opted into the language in such a way that the presumption is that everyone knows what it means. The most worrying trend is that politicians have jumped on the cultural bandwagon, with Prime Minister Howard waxing lyrical about “family values” (i.e. those associated with the nuclear family of the 1950s), Mark Latham talking about “aspirational values” (i.e. those associated with the aspirational classes having the right to accumulate wealth through share ownership and property investments) and even Peter Costello seizing on the opportunity to widen his focus by espousing the value of “building social capital” and the values associated with that. While none of these are misguided, they do run the risk of diluting the potency of values as determinants of modern life and lifestyles and, when used in such broad terms, have the capacity to over-simplify what is a complex subject and one which is at the core of our very existence.
We have been working with values for the last 15 years, both as students and as practitioners in the science of organisational change. We start from the personal and work through to the organisational. How we all, as individuals, view the world is directly determined by our personal values. This ‘world view’ is shaped by the situations we have found ourselves in throughout our lives. Our values are heavily influenced by a number of factors and they keep changing as we mature or as things happen to us. They only in part reflect the person we are at work, just as the person we are at work doesn’t entirely reflect the person our finds or relations see. Factors such as age, gender, religion, family, community, education, technology, the media all influence how we see the world, as does genetics and social context. If there is one aspect of our work over the last ten years that has inspired and moved people, it is the work that we do in employee workshops around surfacing people’s personal values. For many, it provides a window on their internal world, it helps many to understand who they are but also what they can become. We have been touched by the numbers of people who have said after workshops that the values stuff has had a profound effect on them.
Which brings us to the title of this paper. A Sense of Balance is what people crave more than anything else. In the last 40 years we have moved light years away from Carl Jung’s notion that we can pull on a ‘façade’ when we go to work and take it off again when we come home. People now expect that they can be authentic in both places and employers have actively encouraged people to contact the emotional in dealing with fellow employees and are slowly training managers to understand and be able to deal with the emotional intelligence of their subordinates. That is not to say that the revolution has come; quite the contrary, workplaces still owe more the Frederick Taylor and his notion that people can be reduced to machines for the purposes of monitoring and measuring their output. But at least the language is changing and workplaces are now embracing the obligation they have to society to deal with the human side of enterprise.
But it’s a two way street. As people’s faith in corporate human nature is declining, so their expectation of a balanced life is increasing. We once said that the 21st. century would witness the abolition of slavery for the second time only in this case it would be industrial slavery. We used exaggerated language to make a point. Workplaces as truly emancipated and emancipatory institutions have a long way to go. But people deserve a decent life while they are at work and they deserve to be respected as unique human beings. We have seen many reforms in the industrial system over the last 30 years. Human rights have been extended to the workplace by the diminution of child labour in the supply chain, discrimination on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, disability, age have all been outlawed. Sexual harassment, although still endemic in our workplace culture, has at least been proscribed as an unacceptable form of behaviour and bullying, equally systemic, has at least been put on the agenda for ‘outing’ by a civilised society.
We make no apology for working from the inside out. Our focus has always been from an employee perspective rather than a management perspective if, for no other reason than, the management’s view is over-represented in the literature. There are more theories about how to succeed in management, more fads, more gurus peddling the secrets of overnight corporate success than you could poke a stick at. Few people take the employees side and try to explain what might be happening in the internal world of the worker bee. And yet study after study tells us that integration, assimilation, alignment of people’s personal values with the values of the organisation is the magic bullet of organisational success. Everybody’s talking but it seems nobody’s listening.
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