EmployeeNext: Creating success and joy at work

Deepak Chopra’s site has the original article here

Great food for thought about “Employee Future.”

Employment is a relationship. The employee and the employer are in a trusted relationship. The employer trusts the employee to do their jobs as required, and we trust the employer to compensate us and furnish a safe and legal work environment. To treat us fairly and humanely. There are always many elements to this relationship, many agreements, some clearly articulated and some assumed. But at its most fundamental level, employment is a relationship.

Depending on whether we work in a small business or a large one, and anything in between, we could have many employer/employee relationships. As an employee, we have a cultural relationship with the corporation. We have relationships with our direct managers, their managers, our co-workers, customers, stakeholders. It’s infinite really. Even families not directly employed are often involved.

Relationships cannot be healthy without trust. Many other factors play a part, but I firmly believe that any relationship that exists without trust is doomed to fail. It becomes toxic, dysfunctional, unhealthy. All good relationships are built on trust.

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Once of the things I’ve found to be a personal challenge is dealing with the past. Most of us don’t realize we make decisions everyday based on the past, and we even forecast our futures (thereby creating them with our actions and our thinking) by recreating the past. Our perceptions are dictated by the past, and not even always our own actual past experiences! Often our thinking is controlled by past thoughts — teachings from our families, employers, churches, schools, our cultural influences … the list is endless. So we “own” these opinions and judgments and create a set of beliefs and assumptions based on past events and opinions and then use them to guide our current and future decisions. Kinda like driving down I-95 today with a really old map — we’d get off the highway at the same old exit ramp not realizing that of course the new road goes all the way through!

This repetition of past behaviour, expecting different results, creates a myriad of problems for us. We do need to understand the past, observe it, and make sure it gives us a foundation of facts on which we can base opinions and decisions. But we need to direct the decisions using a firm understanding of present conditions — not allow the past to drive the car, read the map, and determine the route.

The past should be treated like a history lesson. It can be very useful, when we don’t attach emotion to it. It is best used to get knowledge about an event, place, person, culture, or organization that will give us good background and understanding, lay a foundation of knowledge we can build on. We can look at lessons learned without fear or judgment.

It’s when we get all caught up in it — the nostalgia, attempts at recreation, (funny how we do forget the bad times quickly and remember the good forever!) the attempts to return to it and “go home again” that we can feel victimized, hopeless, disenfranchised. This is not only a denial of the present, it can become a justification for failure to accept personal responsibility for our own attitudes and behaviours. We start to blame. Get inert. Paralyzed.

So how does this affect us in the workplace? How does this understanding of past employer/employee paradigms help us become “EmployeeNext?” I’ll start a discussion of that using my own personal experiences in my next post.

It’s Saturday and I’ve been concentrating on trying to learn how to blog. Not yet able to get comments implemented correctly on the site so working on that today. Hopefully soon I’ll have the blog in a condition where I can open it up and start to participate in the active blogging community.

Coming from a corporate environment where I could just pick up the phone and call the help desk, I’m finding the open source forum environment challenges my desire for instant gratification! And that raises the questions of expectations — perhaps a great subject for a future post. What exactly do we expect as employees? Now that the rules of the game have changed?

Are unfulfilled expectations and the resentments they engender occurring because we aren’t communicating our needs honestly? Because we can be fearful of the consequences of asking for what we need? Would that require that we really know what we need and why we feel we need it before we ask for it? Which would then imply that we need to think through our needs and wants and what portion of those are our responsibility?

It brings to mind some of the challenges I face as a parent — I often find myself reacting to a request without thinking, just saying no, feeling my defenses rise and responding without thinking. Then, if my son asks me why, and I get calm and really listen and think it through, I’ll often find (much more often than I like) that I don’t actually have a good reason. I’ve acted from habit, or a desire to control and direct. Or from a past perception that has no relevance to the here and now.

Corporations are no longer paternalistic. We no longer live in a world of mutual loyalty and reasonable guarantees of employment assuming we perform as required. The rules have changed, the world has changed. The foundation on which we based our expectations has largely disappeared.

No longer does the large corporation resemble a benevolent parent who sets clear and fair rules which if followed ensure certain security and reasonable rewards. Long term strategies are often trumped by short term decisions to maximize shareholder value and stock performance. In this wonderful age of instant information and misinformation, often we feel we are on shifting sands.

In future posts this week, we’ll discuss the past, present, and future of being an employee. EmployeePast, EmployeePresent, EmployeeNext …….