There must be something in the air because I keep finding interesting articles on employment. I am going to have to create a category specifically for the topic if this keeps up.
This time around it is a piece by Arthur C. Brooks in The American called "I Love My Work." In it, Brooks talks about how important work is to providing meaning and direction in day to day living.
As I have noted before, the feeling that one's work is meaningful, at least by ones own standards, is a powerful motivator.
"...people who think their work allows them to be productive are about five times more likely to be very satisfied with their jobs than people who do not feel they can be productive. And those who are proud to work for their employers are more than ten times as likely to be very satisfied with their jobs as those who are not proud."
Brooks cites a survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago which showed that 89% of people who worked at least 10 hours a week were very to somewhat satisfied with their jobs. The percentages remained about the same whether people were in high income or low income jobs, whether they completed college or not and regardless of working in private, non-profit or government jobs.
And given an opportunity to be financially secure for life without having to work again, 69% of American adults would continue working in some capacity.
One of the areas that I was a little skeptical about was the idea that pay and benefits such as vacations actually detracted from people's enjoyment of work.
"Indeed, there is strong evidence that compensation such as pay and vacation—the “extrinsic rewards” for working—can actually have a negative effect on job satisfaction by degrading the “intrinsic rewards” that people care about so much. The reason for this is that people stop seeing a task as fun when pay is involved."
With that theory, people working for non-profits must be having the most fun of anyone, right? Well, maybe. No matter how much people like work, working long, hard hours under pressure takes the thrill out of the experience for pretty much everyone according to the survey.
I should note that at this point since it sounded like Brooks was implying that employees would be happier being paid less and having fewer vacations days, I checked on The American a little more and wasn't surprised to learn it was run by the conservative American Enterprise Institute. That fact doesn't make the data any less interesting, though it did put some of the analysis and conclusions in perspective.
One of the thing that really interested me was that people who had been unemployed for at least a month at any point within the decade prior to the survey being conducted "were 1/3 less likely to say they were very happy than those who had not been unemployed." Presumably a fair number of the people interviewed had regained employment at the time they had been surveyed.
Again, I was a little wary about how Brooks was interpreting the data. He implies that people are concerned about being unemployed because of the despondency and lack of purpose it brings, citing "the misery of idleness" when discussing job security. He doesn't question if people aren't actually worried that they won't be able to feed their families. I can see how the experience of being unemployed and on welfare, even once, can impact on a person's happiness given that they may worry they will again have hard time providing for their loved ones.
I should note that Brooks anticipates my concerns about what he is advocating by the end of the piece where he remarks that what he is promoting can be accomplished, "Not with a national program to drive down pay and benefits—that would be absurd—but with an effort to find ways to give people a personal sense of control in their jobs."
Posted by Joe at 10:09 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: General Musings